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CQKR1GHT DEPOSIT. 



THE RELIGION 
OF CHRIST 

An Interpretation 



By 

FREDERICK D. KERSHNER, M.A., LL.D. 

Author of "How to Promote Christian Union," 
"Christian Baptism," etc. 




CINCINNATI 

TU3 STANDARD PUBLISHING COMPANY 



Copyright, 1917 
The Standard Publishing Company 



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OCT 26 1917 


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To 

GEORGE W. HARDIN 

in Word and Deed 

a Christian 



Introduction 

THIS book is intended to present a rounded 
and balanced interpretation of the Christian 
religion. In the dual division of vital and 
formal Christianity many perplexing problems are, 
we believe, adequately solved. The division of vital 
Christianity into its ethical and its mystical fea- 
tures, grouped under the captions, "The Here and 
Now" and "The Hereafter," is readily recognized 
as both logical and comprehensive. There may be 
some difference of opinion in regard to the specifi- 
cation of Righteousness, Service and Freedom as 
the three supreme ideals of Jesus. Perhaps the 
majority of present-day authorities would compre- 
hend the subject under the dual division of Right- 
eousness and Service, the one as representing the 
individual and the other the social goal. And yet 
Freedom, as a necessary condition of both Righteous- 
ness and Service, and as representing the principle 
most often violated by theologians and churchmen, 
deserves, we feel sure, a place of its own. 

There may be some readers who will take ex- 
ception to the unique position accorded Christ in 
moral and religious history. Certain it is that the 
Hebrew prophets, especially Isaiah and Micah, 
possessed the ethical view of religion quite as fully 
as did Jesus himself. Socrates also, and divers other 
teachers of the ancient world, taught the same ex- 
alted ideal. And yet, speaking in a large and com- 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION 

prehensive way, we think there can be no reasonable 
exception taken to the statement that Jesus Christ 
made the ethical ideal in religion for the first time 
a world-wide doctrine. He summed up the teach- 
ing of the prophets in himself and he made articu- 
late the dim foreshado wings of better things in 
heathen lands. Just as Jesus stands at the center of 
our chronology, so he stands at the center of a uni- 
versal ethic expressed in terms of a universal 
religion. 

The position taken in the book is, of course, 
frankly ethical, and as such in a large sense non- 
sacramentarian. The character ideal in Christianity 
is regarded as the essential thing first, last, and all 
of the time. Room is left for the mystical and 
spiritual element, but it is frankly recognized that 
the ethical ideal of Jesus, as embodied in practical 
living, is the one ultimate test of Christianity. The 
necessity for formal religion is fully conceded, as 
is the value of formal correctness in our interpreta- 
tion of the teaching of Christ, but this formal ele- 
ment is never exalted to a place where it supersedes 
the vital. Christian character is bigger than the 
Christian Church, big as the latter is. The church 
exists only to produce character, and, failing in this, 
is valueless either to the individual or to society. 
Herein lies a great warning for the church. When- 
ever she ceases to inspire high and noble ideals in 
her members, she is already on the high road to 
decay. As the author of the Apocalypse puts it, 
she must repent and do her first works or else her 
candlestick will be taken out of its place. 



INTRODUCTION 7 

It is worth considering how far the church of 
Christ to-day is really doing "the first works" ; 
that is, emphasizing and developing the ideals of 
Jesus in her followers. Unless she is doing this, 
she is on the certain path to dissolution. Such 
decay is no impeachment of the truthfulness or 
power of the gospel of Jesus, rather is it a vindi- 
cation of that gospel. The church may array her- 
self in all sorts of magical robes and wrap herself 
about with material pomp and ceremony, but, unless 
she is really serving the purpose which her Founder 
intended her to serve, she is drifting to destruction. 

The attacks constantly being made upon organ- 
ized Christianity by the foes of the church always 
gain point by this sort of dereliction. Were the 
church really true to the principles and ideals of her 
Master, most opposition would cease. Of course, 
not all would disappear, for until Armageddon is 
fought, Jesus will have to contend with the great 
antichrist of human selfishness in one form or 
another. Jesus and Nietzsche can never be made to 
harmonize. But with the church as it should be, 
the issue becomes no longer obscure. Each side is 
judged on its own merits, and there is no confusion. 
As it stands, a good deal of real Christianity is to 
be found in the opposition camps, while not a little 
of pure Nietzschian selfishness masquerades under 
the banner of the church of Christ. 

The developing consciousness of humanity is 
hungry for that moral idealism which alone can feed 
the soul. Jesus furnishes this veritable "Bread of 
Life" when his real teaching is brought to the 



8 INTRODUCTION 

famishing human spirit. But to stifle or disguise 
this teaching under any species of religious mum- 
mery is simply to destroy it. Of superstition, 
credulity, and the mere trappings of religion the 
world has had enough. For the church to adhere 
to these things means nothing short of destruction. 
Nor are these things a part of the real religion of 
Christ. Sad indeed is it that the greatest figure in 
the history of the race should so often be wounded 
in the house of his nominal friends. 

It is high time that the real followers of Christ 
should cease their emphasis upon petty points of 
division and center their attention upon the larger 
aspects of Christianity. The Spirit of Formalism, 
which is almost inevitably the Spirit of Intolerance, 
on the inside, and the Spirit of Selfishness, which is 
the Spirit of the World, on the outside, are to-day 
doing their best to throttle the heart of the gospel. 
The unfortunate division of forces on the part of 
the adherents of ethical Christianity gives comfort 
to the foe. May we not hope that this division is 
destined soon to give place to the larger unity which 
was undoubtedly the ideal of our Master? 

Frederick D. Kershner. 



Contents 

PART I 

Christ the Centre of World History 

I. The World Grows to Manhood Through 

Christ . . . . . . 15 

The threefold division of the religion of Christ as 
(I) its idealistic basis, (2) vital Christianity, and 
(3) formal Christianity. The distinction between 
the religion of childhood and the religion of man- 
hood. Adolescence of the world in Christ. 

II. The Reign of Ideals versus the Reign of Law 23 

The imitation of Christ the key-note of Christianity. 
Religion to a Christian not a code of laws to be 
obeyed, but certain great ideals to be realized. 
The ultimate definition of a Christian as one who 
realizes Christ in his own life. 

III. The Relation of Vital to Formal Christian- 

ity . . . . . . .31 

The philosophical distinction between form and con- 
tent. Vital Christianity or the realization of the 
Christ life the end and goal of religion. Formal 
Christianity, the Church, with its ritual, ordinances 
etc., the means to the end proposed. Both essen- 
tial to a true concept of religion. Form valueless 
without content, and content useless without form. 



PART II 

Vital Christianity 

(a) The Here and Now 
The First Great Ideal of Christ — Right- 
eousness ...... 41 

The goal of personal purity and individual con- 
formity to right standards of living. Essential 

9 



10 CONTENTS 

features of Christ's interpretation of the concept. 
(I) Humility. (2) Duty. (3) Kindness: [a) 
the kindly heart; [b) the non-resisting life. 
(4) Industry. (5) Truthfulness. (6) Social 
problems affecting primarily the home : {a) 
marriage; (b) adultery; [c) divorce; (d) 
fornication. (7) Property relations: (a) hon- 
esty ; (b) the problem of wealth ; (c) the 
proper use of material resources. (8) Good 
citizenship. (9) Temperance — threefold viola- 
tion : (a) abuse of good impulses ; (b) use of 
injurious agencies; {c) misuse of occasionally 
good agencies. 

II. The Second Great Ideal of Christ — Service 64 

Fundamental importance of this ideal in Christ's 
teaching. Threefold division 5f the subject: 
(I) the ground of service; (2) the dignity and 
value of service ; and (3) proper expression of 
the ideal of service. 

III. The Third Great Ideal of Christ — Freedom 73 

The last of the great ideals of Christianity. Dif- 
ferent phases of the subject : (1) the general 
concept of freedom; (2) moral freedom; (3) 
intellectual freedom or freedom of thought. 
Proper interpretations of the Great Commission. 
Martyrs to freedom. 

(b) The Future 

IV. The Function of the Supernatural in 

Christ's Teaching . . . .81 

Christianity deals not only with the present but 
also with the future. Christ's attitude towards 
the subject. Distinction between ethics and re- 
ligion at this point. No religion in the true 
sense without the supernatural. The failure of 
positivism. Relation of the natural to the 
supernatural. 

V. The Nature and Criteria of Miracles . 89 

The nature of miracle — Bishop Warren's defini- 
tion. Miracles as signs. Belief in miracles 
dependent upon belief in God and an idealistic 



. CONTENTS 11 

rather than a materialistic interpretation of the 
universe. Present-day miracles. The criteria 
of miracles must be thoroughgoing and com- 
plete. Presumptive and positive evidence both 
demanded. Credulity versus skepticism in the 
matter. 

VI. The Moral Value of Christ's Contribution 

to the Belief in a Future Life . . 97 

The deterrent value of the belief in the future life. 
Stimulative value of such a belief. The creation 
of immortality. The significance of the resur- 
rection. Value of the resurrection as an evi- 
dence of a future life. Christian ethics but no 
Christian religion without the resurrection. 
Changed scientific attitude. 

(c) Epilogue 

VII. Modern Progress and Vital Christianity . 106 

Is Christianity declining ? Answer : (a) from 
statistical point of view ; (b) from point of view 
of the moral pulse of the age. Evidences of the 
presence of vital Christianity : ( I ) the move- 
ment for world-wide peace ; (2) benevolent 
spirit of modern business men ; (3) higher 
moral tone of politics and political life ; (4) 
the banishment of cruelty; (5) movements 
towards a united Christendom ; (6) increased re- 
ligious toleration and sympathy with the masses. 



PART III 
Formal Christianity 

Creed . . 117 

The Church's framework analyzed into the threefold 
outline of (1) creed, (2) ordinance, and (3) polity. 
Definitions. The apostolic creed. Evidence sup- 
porting this creed in the New Testament. No 
statement of theological dogma, but primarily an 
affirmation of will regarding the Christ ideal of 
life. The first great confession of Christendom 
must be its last confession. Unifying power of 
this confession. 



12 CONTENTS 

II. Ordinance 125 

Distinction from creed. The two ordinances of 
Christendom. Baptism— its (1) design, (2) sub- 
jects, and (3) action. The Lord's Supper — in- 
stitution and purpose. The initiatory and per- 
petual ordinances of Christ's religion as constitu- 
ting its formal constitution. Unchanging char- 
acter of this constitution. Theological interpreta- 
tions of the ordinances. 

III. Polity 136 

The problem of church government. The three 
forms now prevalent in Christendom. The New 
Testament precedent. The ultimate polity will 
guarantee perfect freedom to the individual Chris- 
tian and congregation, together with unified action 
for all. The unity of freedom versus the unity of 
compulsion. Liberty and Union the watchwords 
of Christianity. 

IV. The Spiritual and Mystical Element in Re- 

ligion . . . . . . .141 

The subject of worship. Various interpretations of 
the Holy Spirit. The nature and importance of 
prayer. The problem of ritual. The value of the 
aesthetic element in the religious life. 

V. Conversion . . . . . . .149 

The problem a simple one. How people professed 
the religion of Christ in the apostolic days. The 
sermon of Peter. First converts to Christianity. 
Later conversions. Essentially volitional char- 
acter of the process. 

VI. The Church Universal . . . .154 

Early freedom of the Church. Freedom afterwards 
sacrificed to unity, but regained as a result of the 
Reformation. The perfect unity, which will con- 
tain freedom as an element, still to come. The 
Church of Christ, Universal, must embody both 
perfect unity and perfect freedom. The Christ 
Spirit grieved until this is accomplished. The 
final message of Christ to His followers. 
x\ppendix ....... 161 



PART I 

Christ the Centre of World History 



THE WOELD GEOWS TO MANHOOD 
THEOUGH CHEIST 

THE teaching of Jesus Christ involved three 
things : first, a change of basis from that 
of all preceding religions ; second, the 
furnishing of a new moral ideal for the world ; and 
third, the adoption of a new method for the exten- 
sion of religious truth. A new religious basis, a 
new ideal of life, a new method for extending the 
truth — these three things make up the religion of 
Christ. We shall treat of the first under the cap- 
tion of Christ the Centre of World History ; the 
second is The Story of Vital Christianity ; and the 
third that of Formal Christianity or The Church 
as an Organization in the World. 

With regard to the first of these divisions, it 
may be said that all preceding religions, not except- 
ing the Hebrew, were religions of external cere- 
mony, of sacrifices and burnt offerings, of temples 
and tabernacles, of platters and lavers, and of tith- 
ings of mint, of anise and of cummin. Men be- 
lieved, in many lands, that the way to get rid of sin 
and to propitiate the gods was to burn their children 
15 



16 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

in the arms of Moloch, or to have them 
through the fires of Ashtaroth. Upon the blazing 
altars of Carthage, on more than one occasion, a 
hundred smiling infants, born of the noblest fathers 
and mothers in the land, were cast into the flames, 
stretching out their dimpled hands and uttering 
their innocent cries while the pitiless priests 
drowned their voices with the beating of cymbals 
and of drums. 

Now the people who did these things believed 
that they were serving God. The mother gave up 
her boy to his awful doom, believing that God was 
pleased with her action. The father crushed down 
the agony of his heart as he thought of the terrible 
fate of his baby girl, because he believed that God 
demanded the sacrifice. We are shocked, as we 
well may be, when we think of these things to-day ; 
and yet, looked at from the point of view of sacri- 
fice alone, there was something about the self-denial 
of these heathen fathers and mothers which had in 
it at least a touch of the heroic, a touch of the 
sublime. 

But the human sacrifices of the Carthaginians, 
no less than the milder offerings of the Greeks, and 
the ceremonial rites of the Hebrews, were, after 
all, only external devices for solving the problem of 
sin, and the counter-problem of growth in the 



MANHOOD THROUGH CHRIST 17 

moral life. The world was still in its childhood, 
and it had to understand things through symbols, 
or else not understand them at all. It had to have 
its building blocks and its picture books, its alpha- 
bet and its horn book, before it could be prepared 
for the better day to come. So also, in the incipi- 
ent moral training of the race, the method was one 
of physical compulsion rather than of genuine 
moral freedom. The stern commandments of Sinai 
thundered the moral law into the ears of the people 
with the imperious " Thou shalt not " preceding 
every phrase, and the dread penalty of physical 
death awaiting the lawbreaker. There was a 
superfluity of regulations covering, as it seemed, 
every possible moral transgression, with penalties 
affixed to each. Nothing was left to the individual 
judgment. Everybody was looked after; every- 
thing, in modern parlance, was " cut and dried " ; 
and the whole nation checked off and compelled to 
be good, whether it desired to be so or not. It was 
all the pedagogical method of childhood. 

But the dawn of a new day came with the proc- 
lamation of the Sermon on the Mount. Humanity, 
at one stride, through the moral teaching of Christ, 
passes from the period of childhood to the full- 
grown glory of moral manhood and womanhood. 
The building-blocks and the A, B, C's are put 



IS CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

away ; the old ceremonial rites are discarded ; the 
formal laws of the temple and the altar are no 
longer regarded as the ultimate factors in religion. 
Most of all, the moral training of the race passes 
from the external restrictions of the child to the 
freedom of choice and the building up of a moral 
ideal, which alone constitute character or morality, 
in the true sense of the term. Instead of the im- 
perious " Thou shalt " or " Thou shalt not," uttered 
amid the thunders and lightnings of Sinai, there is 
the gentle, " Be ye also perfect as your Father in 
heaven is perfect," of the Mount of Beatitudes. 
The reign of personality succeeds the reign of law ; 
the rule of moral freedom, that of physical com- 
pulsion ; Moses gives place to Christ ; and the 
world grows to manhood through the moral revolu- 
tion of the Man of Galilee. 

The importance of this change cannot be meas- 
ured in words. Jesus Christ came, we are told, in 
the fullness of time. He came to work the might- 
iest revolution the earth has ever known. The 
world has been slow to appreciate the full signifi- 
cance of the change. Time and time again, even 
after the light in all its splendor had burst upon the 
startled gaze of humanity, man has deliberately 
gone back to his old idols of the past. Ecclesiasti- 
cism, the worship of images, the horrors of mediae- 



MANHOOD THEOUGH CHRIST 19 

val priestcraft, much even of present-day ceremo- 
nialism — thsse all are, and have been, only attempts 
to fasten the restrictions of childhood upon the full- 
grown manhood of the human race. But just as 
the child throws aside its building-blocks and its 
alphabet, and has no further use for them, so hu- 
manity has dispensed with ecclesiasticism and the 
worship of external ceremonies. Unfortunately, 
too often the true religion of Jesus Christ, which 
was responsible, in the first place, for the transition, 
has suffered in the reaction. Priestcraft, while not 
entirely responsible for the excesses of a Voltaire, a 
Diderot, or a Rousseau, had at least much to do 
with them. A formal Christianity, stifled by ec- 
clesiasticism, is indeed as far from the true spirit 
and mind of the Master as a so-called " moral skep- 
ticism " which contains much of the kernel of His 
teaching, though failing to give credit for it where 
it belongs. This I take to be the meaning of those 
famous lines of one of the greatest Christian poets 
of the nineteenth century : 

" Perplext in faith but pure in deeds, 
At last he beat his music out. 
There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds.' ' 

These words are not intended to be a glorification 
of doubt. They are not an impeachment of the 



20 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

right sort of creed, but they are a warning served 
upon the earthly guardians of the Church, to one 
end. That end is never to sacrifice the Christ ideal 
of purity of life, in exchange for a barren worship 
of rites and ceremonies. 

The true Christian, by virtue of his birthright as 
a Christian, must be first of all a moral individual, 
one possessing the power of choice, one who moulds 
and fashions his own spiritual nature after an ideal 
goal which he places before him, rather than one 
who is scourged into good behavior, — a process 
which, by virtue of the scourge, has no moral 
quality about it. It is sometimes said nowadays 
that there is a species of unconscious prejudice on 
the part of the average man against what may be 
styled " churchly things," and the ecclesiastical 
habit. Like a good many other unconscious preju- 
dices, it is well founded. Its basis consists in the 
fact that the world has grown beyond the rule of 
external forms, and too often these are substituted 
for the moral content and heart of the religious life. 
Now the Church has only herself to blame if she 
has allowed others to interpret her message better 
than she has chosen to interpret that message her- 
self. That there is and must be a formal element 
in all religion, may well be conceded ; but it should 
always be remembered that this formal element can 



MANHOOD THROUGH CHRIST 21 

never take the place of the true heart and core of 
Christianity, which is a voluntary transformation of 
life, due to the influence of the Christ ideal upon the 
soul. St. Panl has put the whole question ade- 
quately and magnificently in those superb words of 
the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. " But we 
all," he says, " with open face beholding as in a 
glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the 
same image from glory to glory, even as by the 
Spirit of the Lord." 

Moreover, the Christian life, as embodied in the 
religion of Jesus, means not only freedom from the 
bondage of external ceremonies, but it also means 
something more than a mere tissue of beautiful 
dreams or aspirations towards the goal. Next to 
the blight of ceremonialism, which does things, 
though in an altogether useless and harmful sort of 
way, comes the blight of inanity, of the dreamer, of 
the man who is always " going to be " but never 
" is " — the pink-and- white moonshine of modern so- 
cial faddists who would reform the world at after- 
noon teas, and get rid of Whitechapel by simply 
waving it lordly out of existence. Over against 
this sentimental boobyism come the clear-cut words 
of the Master, " My Father worketh hitherto and I 
work " ; " The harvest truly is plenteous, but the 
laborers are few : pray ye therefore the Lord of the 



22 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

harvest that He will send forth laborers into His 
harvest." Jesus Christ did not attempt to get rid 
of sin by passing resolutions at an afternoon tea or 
in a richly decorated lyceum parlor. No ! a thou- 
sand times, No ! He went out into the highways 
and the byways and preached and taught and lived 
the God life, and the true Christian to-day must do 
the same thing. 

" Be what thou seemest, live thy creed, 
Hold up to earth the torch divine, 
Be what thou prayest to be made, 

Let the Great Master's steps be thine. 

" Fill np each hour with what will last, 
Buy up the momeDts as they go, 
The life above, when this is past 
Is the ripe fruit of life below." 



II 

THE EEIGN OF IDEALS VEESUS THE EEIGN 
OF LAW 

IF we may be permitted to speak of a world- 
consciousness parallelling in a measure the 
consciousness of the individual, then the 
advent of Christianity marks the transition point 
from the non-moral period of childhood to the adult 
morality of manhood or womanhood. The world 
was a child, to continue the figure, until Christ 
came. After His advent, it progressed rapidly 
towards manhood. What marks the transition 
from the non-moral to the moral period in the in- 
dividual is the recognition of personal responsibility. 
The supreme lesson which Christ brought into the 
world was the value of the individual soul and the 
responsibility attaching to it. It is of the very 
essence of the Nazarene's teaching that He laid 
down no enactments to be obeyed. His whole 
doctrine was one of ideals rather than of positive 
statutes. Moses was a great lawgiver, but Christ 
gave no laws at all. As a formulator of ideals, 
however, His name stands unique among the 
teachers of the world. As the painter sees the 
23 



24 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

beautiful picture before his mind's eye and strives 
to spread it upon canvas, and as the sculptor sees 
the glowing image before his gaze and fashions the 
snowy marble after his vision, so Christ holds up 
before humanity the perfect likeness of the good 
life, and asks that we realize it, and transmute our 
lives into the likeness of His own. That was a true 
insight which caused good old Thomas a Kempis 
to style the greatest devotional book of the ages 
" The Imitation of Christ. " Christ never formulated 
a code, never used the words " Thou shalt," never 
treated citizens of the goodly moral universe as 
children, but always as men. He knew that even 
He could not compel men to be good, that such 
compulsion was indeed the very opposite of that 
spirit of holiness which He came to proclaim. 
Laws for children, but ideals for men ; laws for the 
political world, but ideals for the moral and relig- 
ious world ; laws for the old and outgrown world 
of the past, but ideals for the new and resplendent 
universe of God. So it is that Christ, with His 
perfect personality, His rich and abundant life, His 
mighty, inspiring example, constitutes and always 
has constituted the essence of Christianity. Amid 
diverse opinions and multitudinous theories, based 
upon that uniqueness of thought and feeling w T hich 
is the secret of the individual, there has yet been a 



KEIGN OF IDEALS VS. REIGN OF LAW 25 

striking unanimity of belief among the good of all 
Christian communions in regard to the centre of 
their religions convictions and belief. " Thon, O 
Christ, art all I want," has been ever the cry of the 
devout and the holy of a world-wide Christendom. 
Ever the prayer of the Christian has been : 

"We would see Jesus — for the shadows lengthen 
Across this little landscape of our life ; 
We would see Jesus, our weak faith to strengthen 
For the last weariness — the final strife. 

" We would see Jesus — the great Rock Foundation, 
Whereon our feet were set with sovereign grace ; 
Not life, nor death, with all their agitation, 
Can thence remove us, if we see His face." 

To see Jesus is to gaze upon Him as an ideal, to see 
in Him the perfect figure which we are to fashion 
out of the rebellious marble of our own little lives. 
This is the religion of Christ, to realize Him in us, 
to transmute our own stubborn wills into His 
divine will, and to be in the end like Him. Who 
then is a Christian ? He who has most of Christ 
in him ; not he who wears a particular theological 
label, or he who subscribes to a particular creed, or 
he who wraps himself in a special vestment or robe, 
but he who wears Christ in his heart, who has trod 
with Him perchance the Yia Dolorosa of suffering, 
and who likewise wears with Him the Crown of 
Light. He who has learned to love like Him, to 



26 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

forgive like Him, to be humble with Him, to give 
all, as He told the rich young ruler, and to count 
it as naught. Robert Burns, in the earliest of his 
letters which has reached us, says in his own charac- 
teristic way, " I am more pleased w T ith the fifteenth, 
sixteenth and seventeenth verses of the seventh 
chapter of Revelation than with ten times as many 
verses in the whole Bible, and would not exchange 
the noble enthusiasm with which they inspire me 
for all that this world has to offer." 

But the galaxy of saints and martyrs pictured in 
the noble passage to which the poet refers is not 
made up of the adherents of a particular creed or 
party, but of the redeemed of all ages and climes 
and conditions — those who lived with Christ on 
earth and on that account live with Him in the 
great Beyond. Therefore to be a Christian, once 
more, is to realize the ideals of Christ, to voluntarily 
fashion your own life after His, and to choose of 
your own "Trill, day by day, to be like Him. 

Many people, like children before they reach the 
age of responsibility, are not ready for a gospel of 
ideals. The only religion they can comprehend is 
the religion of statute and legal enactment, of com- 
mandments and laws. Mohammedanism controls 
a tenth of the world to-day for this reason. The 
gospel of Mohammed was not one of ideals, but one 



REIGN OF IDEALS VS. BEIGN OF LAW 27 

of law. Compulsion, not volition, was his watch- 
word. It is a fact recognized even now by many- 
missionaries that there are some peoples to whom 
this crude interpretation of religion appeals more 
powerfully than the more enlightened teachings of 
Christ. Nations which are yet children demand a 
gospel of this sort, but they can grow to manhood 
only through a religion of ideals, through the 
religion of Jesus. 

No man understood the teaching of Christ 
better than His greatest apostle, Paul of Tarsus; 
but Paul constantly brings out the antithesis 
between the religion of bondage, typified for 
him by the Jewish law, and the religion of 
freedom, exemplified for him in Christ. The 
Epistle to the Galatians in its entirety is a splendid 
expression of this antithesis. The law was our 
schoolmaster, is its burden, to bring us to Christ. 
Always, in Paul's mind, there is a superb feeling 
of gratitude because of his deliverance from the 
bondage of statute and his entrance upon the 
glorious freedom of the sons of God. He is very 
jealous of this freedom, and contends sharply for it. 
At the great and imminent risk of causing a schism 
among the newly planted churches, he strives 
vigorously for that change from the rule of laws to 
the rule of ideals which he well and fully recognizes 



28 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

as the very kernel of his Master's teaching. His 
constant effort is that Christ may be formed in 
him, and he esteems all things dross in order that 
he may realize Christ. 

The Apostle John recognized no less than Paul 
the value and character of Christ's mission. No 
finer contrast between the Old and the New could 
have been drawn than that which is afforded in the 
first chapter of his Gospel: "For the law was 
given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus 
Christ." In those superb figures characterizing 
Jesus, with which the Gospel of John abounds, we 
recognize the devotion of the artist for the perfect 
ideal of beauty which draws the best that is in the 
soul irresistibly to itself. Paul was the philosopher 
of the new religion, but John was its artist and 
poet. In the magnificent pictures of the Apoca- 
lypse, in the splendid poetry of the Gospel, in the 
limpid, mystical prose of the First Epistle, we read 
the devotion of the artist for the perfect vision of 
beauty which it was vouchsafed him to behold. 
John, because he was a poet, and thought in poetical 
imagery and revelled in artistic language, under- 
stood, with an understanding granted to the poet 
alone, the beauty of the new freedom which his 
Master came to proclaim. It is doubtful whether 
there are three quotations in the Scriptures which 



REIGN OF IDEALS VS. KEIGN OF LAW 29 

interpret the new doctrine quite so fully as those 
three monumental passages from the Fourth Gospel : 
" For God so loved the world that He gave His 
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in 
Him should not perish, but have everlasting life " ; 
and again, " God is a spirit : and they that worship 
Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth " ; and 
still again, " Ye shall know the truth, and the truth 
shall make you free." 

The religion of Christ means fundamentally, 
therefore, a deliverance from the reign of law, and 
an entrance into the glorious kingdom of ideals in 
which the central and foremost figure is ever that 
of the Christ Himself. This is the kingdom of the 
free man, of the citizen of God, of all who share in 
our divine humanity. In this kingdom, too, there 
is a common brotherhood. As we realize Christ, 
we are drawn together, so that there is a funda- 
mental unity in the common ground upon which 
we stand and the common goal which we seek. 
There have been those in all religious communions 
who believed, or affected to believe, that their own 
immediate circle contained all of the elect, all of 
the band mentioned in the seventh chapter of the 
Apocalypse, all, forsooth, who belonged to Christ. 
These men, however, never dared to face their 
belief squarely ; for if they had so done, their own 



30 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

consciences must have given the lie to them. Who 
are Christians, again ? My party, or your party, or 
parties ? Nay, nay, my brother. They are Chris- 
tians who best realize Christ, and no creed holds 
assuredly a monopoly of such. Doubtless the right 
creed has indeed much to do with the right life, 
and yet it has sometimes been true, in past history, 
that the good life has been lived as it were in 
defiance of creed or party affiliations. Surely a 
man possesses the religion of Christ, who can ap- 
preciate and offer up as incense from the depth of 
his heart, those words of George Matheson : 

" O Love, that wilt not let me go, 
I rest my weary soul in thee ; 
I give tbee back the life I owe, 
That in thine ocean depths its flow 
May richer, fuller be. 

" O Light, that followest all my way, 
I yield my flickering torch to thee ; 
My heart restores its borrowed ray, 
That in thy sunshine's blaze its day 
May brighter, fairer be. 

"O Joy, that seekest me through pain, 
I cannot close my heart to thee ; 
I trace the sunshine through the rain, 
And feel the promise is not vain 
That morn shall tearless be. 

11 Cross, that liftest up my head, 
I dare not ask to fly from thee ; 
I lay in dust life's glory dead, 
And from the ground there blossoms red 
Life that shall endless be." 



Ill 

THE EELATION OF VITAL TO FOEMAL 
CHEISTIAMTY 

AMOJSTG all philosophers since the days of 
Aristotle there has been much use and 
recognition of the distinctions implied in 
the words form and content. Things are made up 
essentially of both these elements. The form of a 
thing is that which organizes and gives shape to the 
material which enters into it. The content is the 
material which fills up the empty but none the less 
valuable form. Form without content is empty 
and valueless. Content without form is helpless 
and without individuality. Each is useless without 
the other, and both are needed to make up a thing. 
This philosophical distinction is of use in under- 
standing clearly the religion of Christ. That which 
constitutes its form, which gives it shape and or- 
ganization and individuality is the Church, with its 
ordinances and laws. That which the Church 
fosters, and for which it indeed exists, is the moral 
life. There can be no religion without the Church, 
nor can there be any true religion without the 
Christian life. The former is the means, the latter 
31 



32 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

the end. ' The Church exists to produce and foster 
the Christ life among men. She is always a means, 
never an end in herself. Her goal is Christ, and 
through her we see Him. She it is who leads 
us to Him, and without her, we should soon cease 
to think or care for Him. The end of the re- 
ligion of Christ is therefore the Christ life, or, as 
we have chosen to style it, vital Christianity. 
The means through which alone this end may 
be realized is the Church, or as we have elected 
to call it, the formal side of Christ's teaching. 
Vital without formal religion soon dies ; formal 
without vital is dead already. Both are essential, 
and the one cannot live long without the other. 

Much harm has resulted in the past from the sub- 
stitution of formal for vital religion, or from an at- 
tempt to make an end out of the means. Instead 
of the Christ life, men thought the essential thing 
was the church form ; instead of love or purity, 
they put external worship ; and they went to 
church with their hands bathed in blood and 

1 Nothing in this chapter, it is quite unnecessary to say, should 
be held to mean the identification of "form" with "means," or 
"content " with " end," as philosophical terms. From one point 
of view, formal Christianity is a means and vital Christianity 
an end. From another, the one represents the form, and the 
other the content of the Christian religion. We believe both 
points of view to be correct, but the terms themselves should not 
be confused. 



VITAL AND FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 33 

thought they were clean. No student of Italian 
history during the Middle Ages can fail to appre- 
ciate the significance of this distinction. It was 
said of the Medici family, many of them at least, 
that they were very religious, but very immoral as 
well. No one can enter that Tuscan castle where a 
scion of noble birth strangled his wife to death, de- 
spite her pleadings, performing most assiduously 
his devotions, both before and after the deed, with- 
out being struck by the contrast between the relig- 
ious form and the religious life. Murder, adultery, 
theft and all manner of uncleanness have existed 
side by side with the altar, and even beneath the 
priestly stole. Not all of the people who did these 
things were hypocrites. One can never enter into 
the spirit of Italian history or life if he thinks so. 
There was a misapprehension in many minds re- 
garding the true place and function of the Church, 
and hence arose much of the evil that makes us 
shudder as we read of it. People had mistaken the 
means for the end. Instead of recognizing the 
Church as the means for producing the Christ life, 
they had magnified her importance until she be- 
came an end in herself, and to serve her constituted 
therefore the end of life. This error has also been 
largely responsible for the persecutions which at 
various times have stained the history of Christen- 



34 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

dom. Conscientious men put those who did not 
believe as they did to death with cruel tortures, be- 
cause the Church, with its forms and requirements, 
had taken the place of the Christ life in their eyes. 
Nor were these things confined to mediaeval times, 
or the history of Italy. Other nations and climes 
were equally guilty, and no form of Christianity is 
entirely free from blame. As long as people be- 
lieved that a certain form was the vital thing in 
making preparation for heaven, or that a particular 
intellectual belief was essential in order to save an 
individual from the flames of hell, in all kindness 
such people were likely to torture others in order 
to make them accept the form, and to coerce their 
intellects into swallowing the belief. Whenever 
men realized that the Christ life, the life of purity, 
of love and of service, was the goal of Christianity, 
all persecution ceased. The most pathetic thing in 
all the history of the ages is the story of the misun- 
derstood Christ. More crimes have been com- 
mitted in His name even than in the name of liberty. 
Well might Browning say in " Fra Lippo Lippi " : 

" Because of Christ 
Whose sad face on the cross sees only this 
After the passion of a thousand years." 

In the Christian economy, vital Christianity pre- 
ceded formal in point of chronology. Jesus Christ 



VITAL AND FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 35 

preached and taught and lived the divine life be- 
fore His Church was founded, and only after He 
had formulated the Christ ideal was the framework 
set up which was to preserve it throughout the 
ages. The Christ life preceded the Christ Church ; 
the end was considered before the means. Very 
properly, too, the Gospels are given a place in our 
New Testament before the Acts. The Christ ideal 
must come first in every study of the religion of 
Christ, just as we must fix our eyes on the goal be- 
fore we try to discover the means by which we may 
hope to reach it. To consider the means without 
thinking first of the end is an absurdity ; for 
while there may be an end without the means, there 
can be no means without an end. 

Because, however, the end comes first in time, 
and in a certain sense in importance, this is no rea- 
son why due credit and value should not attach to 
the means. The Beautiful City without a road to 
reach it would remain an illusion, and only the 
baseless fabric of a dream. The Christ ideal with- 
out the Church to cherish it and keep it alive in the 
hearts of men would soon lose all practical signifi- 
cance. Were the Church to disappear, the Christ 
life would likewise disappear in a short time. 
Hence the imperative necessity for the Church, 
with its ordinances and forms, all of them symbol- 



36 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

izing and interpreting Christ for the human heart. 
The sacraments of the Church speak of the life and 
death of Him whom they commemorate ; the pulpit 
is an open forum where the Christ life and the 
Christ ideals are constantly held up before the gaze 
of men. Abolish the sacraments, do away with the 
churches, silence the voice of the minister, and soon 
people would forget the Christ life, and sink be- 
neath the waves of an unbelieving materialism. 

Herein, therefore, we recognize the function of 
the Church, as well as the obligation of every indi- 
vidual to ally himself with it. There can be no 
salvation save as Christ is realized in our lives, but 
without the Church the world would soon forget 
the realization, and we on this account owe it to 
our own selves and to the world to support and 
adhere to the Church. No salvation without the 
Christ life, no Christ life without the Church, 
therefore no salvation without the Church — thus the 
argument runs, and its logic is indisputable. Not 
only is there an obligation upon each one of us to 
uphold the Church because of its value to the world 
at large, but every individual, no matter how 
pious or moral by nature, needs the constant stim- 
ulus of worship and the religious life, in order 
to keep his vision of the Good unclouded and 
whole. The man who presumably might be good 



VITAL AND FOKMAL CHRISTIANITY 37 

enough to get along without the Church is always 
the one who never wants to do without it ; whereas 
the man who thinks he does not need it usually 
needs it most. The cleanest men of to-day, 
whether in or out of the Church, are unconscious 
products of its influence. The best modern skeptics 
owe their power to the unconscious inheritance and 
assimilation of the ideals preserved by the Church. 
Often the Church has forgotten her mission, often 
she has poorly performed it, often she has misinter- 
preted and even slandered it, yet she remains its 
sole appointed guardian, and without her it would 
wither and die. Therefore the religion of Christ 
means not only the Christ ideal, the content, as it 
were, of Christianity, but likewise the Church, 
which constitutes its form. As well talk of a thing 
without any form as a Christian without a Church. 
A man who believes in vital Christianity can ad- 
vance no good argument for remaining outside of 
the Church, which will not apply with triple force 
to his becoming a member of it. 

" But the Church," some one says, " pray tell us 
what is the Church ? Many claim the definite ar- 
ticle, but which Church can make good her claim ? 
Or are we to infer that any and every Church is 
The Church, or that all churches are equally the 
bearers of vital Christianity ? " Obviously, many 



38 CHRIST THE CENTRE OF HISTORY 

roads may lead to the same point ; some, however, 
are more difficult, some more uncertain, some more 
circuitous than others. Christ assuredly founded a 
Church, specifying its requirements, and explaining 
its organic structure. The unprejudiced judgment 
and conscience of each individual must decide in 
every case how this ideal Church is best realized 
for him, in the actual world. I have no right to 
judge in this matter for you, nor have you any 
right to judge for me. In some cases, doubtless, 
churches which may seem to us formally correct 
are apparently the bearers of less vital Christianity 
than others less correct in form. This, however, is 
no argument against correctness of form. In the 
long run, the church which is ideal in form will be 
ideal in content, just as the shortest and safest road 
to the goal will in the long run prove to be the best. 
The religion of Christ presupposes an ideal content, 
clothed likewise in an ideal form. Neither can be 
substituted for the other, and both are essential to 
a genuine Christianity. 



PART II 

Vital Christianity 



(a) The Here and Now 



THE FIEST GREAT IDEAL OF CHEIST — 
RIGHTEOUSNESS 

THE teaching of Christ being preeminently 
a doctrine of ideals, a knowledge of these 
ideals constitutes the very heart and core 
of Christianity. Much has of course been written 
in regard to this all-important subject. At the 
very outset, it may be said that Jesus Christ af- 
firmed the moral teaching of the Ten Command- 
ments and the Mosaic doctrine, as regards truthful- 
ness, purity, and cleanness of life. The Sermon on 
the Mount states distinctly that He came " not to 
destroy, but to fulfill." When the rich young 
ruler came following after Him desiring to be His 
disciple, the young man was told, first of all, to 
obey the commandments. Christ's ideal of right- 
eousness, as expressed in the Gospels, is therefore 
very comprehensive, embracing as it does the full 
substance and content of the Mosaic idea of morals. 
Not only, however, does it include the Mosaic ideal, 
but it adds certain features to which Moses made 
little if any reference. 

41 



42 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

Perhaps the most striking of these features 
is the teaching concerning meekness, or humility. 
This virtue, so foreign to preceding systems of 
ethics, was announced as the very corner-stone 
of the Christ ideal of righteousness. The radical 
divergence of Christ's teaching t from previous 
standards comes out very clearly here. Not 
only is His doctrine at this point a reversal of 
older theories of conduct, but biologically it seems 
a contradiction of the very law of human develop- 
ment. The survival of the fittest means, if it 
means anything, not humility but self-assertiveness. 
The meek lion, or the humble tiger, would not long 
survive as separate species. And yet, strange as 
the contradiction seemed, and seems, its truthful- 
ness becomes more apparent to every age. The 
meek and lowly Nazarene Himself will outlast an 
Alexander, a Caesar or a Napoleon, the supreme ex- 
amples of egoism. The ideal of humility is recog- 
nized more and more as the only true basis upon 
which to rear the life of the scholar, the gentleman 
or the worker. Humility is the key to knowledge, 
the soul of any true courtesy, and the sine qua non 
of all efficient labor. It lies at the basis of docil- 
ity, and without docility there can be no such 
thing as either education or scholarship. The atti- 
tude of the little child is always the attitude of the 



FIKST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 43 

greatest scientist, of the most perfect gentleman, 
and of the man who learns to wield and direct the 
world's work. 

This lesson, the first in the alphabet of Christ, 
has been the hardest for the world to learn. The 
Hebrew despised his neighbor and had a tremen- 
dous bump of religious conceit. What the Gentile 
was to the Jew, the Barbarian was to the Greek. 
Even the most cultured Hellenists, such as Aris- 
totle and Zeno, maintained a pride of intellect 
quite foreign to the teaching of the Nazarene. 
Many of the tenets of Christ regarding practical 
life are duplicated in Stoicism and other forms of 
Greek and Roman ethics, but humility is not one of 
them. The good man, before Christ, knew his 
goodness and was proud of it. Humility he would 
have regarded as a weakness, and weakness was to 
him the worst sin of all. 

But if Christ defined the right preparation for 
living to be the attitude of humility, no less did He 
assert that the proper guide for life itself was the 
lode-star of duty. No man ever ordered his career 
more absolutely in harmony with what he con- 
ceived to be his mission than the One Great Man 
of all. His constant conception of life was that He 
had a duty to fulfill, a mission to accomplish, His 



44 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

Father's business to be about ; and even though 
that mission brought Gethseniane and Calvary in 
its train, it had none the less to be accomplished. 
All the really great men of the world since His 
time have had the same idea. The Apostle Paul 
said when he bade farewell to the elders of Ephesus, 
" Neither count I my life dear unto myself so that 
I might finish my course with joy " ; and when 
later he wrote his farewell message to Timothy, he 
said, " I have finished my course." Luther thought 
of life as a place for the working out of purpose, 
and conceived of himself as one who had a mission 
to fulfill. Calvin pushed the idea perhaps to an ex- 
treme. Even irreligious men have sometimes held 
to similar views. Napoleon believed in his star, 
Socrates in his Daemon. Christ's concept of duty, 
however, was more rounded and perfect than that 
of the ordinary point of view. He identified the 
voice of duty with the voice of God, and He kept 
constantly merging the human soul in the divine. 
It is in this sense that we perhaps most clearly 
understand His divinity. The man who performs 
his duty best approaches closest to God's will and 
purpose for him, and therefore approaches closest 
to God. No Christian can neglect his duty and 
remain a Christian. The underlying motive for 
the whole life of Christ was always this devotion 



FIRST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 45 

to an ideal standard of conduct. No man ever 
lived out as He did those superb lines of Words- 
worth : 

"To humbler functions, Awful Power ! 
I call thee : I myself commend 
Unto thy guidance from this hour j 
Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 
Give unto me, made lowly wise, 
The spirit of self-sacrifice ; 
The confidence of reason give ; 
And in the light of truth thy Bond- 
man let me live ! ' ' 



Following duty as an essential in the great ideal 
of righteousness, Christ enunciated the principle of 
kindness. This principle, as He taught it, involved 
two sides, a negative and a positive, an indi- 
vidual and a social. The negative feature alone 
concerns us here, as the positive will be treated un- 
der the ideal of service. On this side, two char- 
acteristics may be distinguished : first, the kindly 
heart ; and second, the non-resisting life. Back of 
all these considerations is, of course, the greatest 
motive power in the world — love. Love negatively 
expressed gives us the kind heart ; positively ex- 
pressed, it yields the life of service. No feature of 
Christ's doctrine is more fundamental than this. 
Above all other things, the Supreme Teacher was 
kind. He who was subjected to the awful torture 



46 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

of the cross would not Himself harm the lowliest 
of God's creatures. He dried many tears, but by 
His own actions He caused none to flow. The 
prophet had said of Him, " A bruised reed shall He 
not break, and smoking flax shall He not quench " ; 
and as the most striking symbol by which to pic- 
ture Him, he selected the animal which is known 
as the gentlest of all the creations of God. The 
spirit of unkindness, of discourtesy, of harshness 
and bitterness, to say nothing of cruelty or slaugh- 
ter, is totally foreign to Him. The strangest of 
all the perversions of Christianity was that which 
enabled men to torture and maim their fellow crea- 
tures in the name of the Lamb of God ! Among 
the sins eliminated by this principle are hatred, 
murder, cruelty, slander, slavery, ill temper and 
revenge. War, with its attendant demons, will 
certainly disappear before the law of kindness 
instituted by the gentle command of the Prince of 
Peace. No principle of the Nazarene means quite 
so much for humanity ; and for the world to catch 
Christ's vision of this one ideal would in a single 
day usher in the splendor of the Millennium Dawn. 
The second division of the law of kindness deals 
with the subject of the non-resisting life. Much 
has been said in recent years regarding the doctrine 
of non-resistance, chiefly through the writings of 



FIRST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 47 

Tolstoi, the great Russian reformer and writer. 
The doctrine itself is not new. St. Francis of 
Assisi believed in it, as did George Fox, and hosts 
of others. Its basis is contained in the passages 
from the Sermon on the Mount found especially in 
Matthew v. 38-48. The seemingly impractical 
character of these utterances has caused a large 
majority of people to tacitly disregard them, with- 
out at the same time denying their validity as 
Scripture. Of late years a few writers and teach- 
ers, such, for instance, as Professor Foster, have 
denied the theoretical value of that which they 
could not approve in practice. We have thus a 
threefold attitude towards the doctrine of non-re- 
sistance. First, that of Tolstoi, who accepts liter- 
ally, in both theory and practice, the teaching; 
second, that of the bulk of non-thinking Christians, 
who accept it in theory but disregard it in practice ; 
and third, that of men like Foster, who disregard 
it both in theory and practice. What is the solu- 
tion which the follower of Christ should reach and 
adopt ? Obviously the great difficulty lies in a mis- 
understanding of the nature of the Sermon on the 
Mount. It is not a code of laws, but a collection 
of ideals. Ideals are not easily realized, and must 
always lead the way a long distance before actual 
realization. The key to the problem is found in 



48 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

verse forty-eight of Matthew five : " Ye therefore 
shall be perfect as your Father in heaven is per- 
fect." The doctrine of non-resistance is ideal, and 
should always be kept before the mind as the goal 
of Christianity. Whether it is entirely practical at 
the present time, one may well doubt. Still, in so 
far as these ideals are at all practicable, they 
should be realized, and constant effort should be 
made to influence the world in such a way that 
each generation will see them realized to a greater 
and still greater degree. 

Another fundamental feature of the Christ ideal 
of righteousness was the virtue of industry. In all 
the teaching of the Great Master, there is not a 
good word said for a lazy man. His life was in it- 
self the incarnation of industry. Up until thirty 
years of age He worked with His own hands as a 
carpenter. His crowded three years' ministry was 
one of marked activity. Not only did Christ work 
Himself, but His sympathies were always with the 
workers. His sharpest criticisms were hurled upon 
those who attempted to make money by extortion 
or at the expense of the poor. Jesus was not an 
aristocrat ; He was a proletariat. Of late years, 
efforts have been made in certain quarters to line up 
the working men against the Church. That the 



FIRST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 49 

Church has always been prone to forget the mission 
of her Founder and crystallize into a more or less 
aristocratic club, has been unfortunately too true. 
How old the tendency is may be gathered from the 
fact that it is alluded to in one of the oldest of 
all the New Testament Scriptures — the Epistle of 
James. The severe condemnation which it there 
receives has not served to crush out the evil. Very 
often, indeed, the Church has put herself out of 
harmony with labor, organized or unorganized, but 
fortunately this is far less true to-day than it has 
been in the past. One of the larger Protestant 
denominations now employs a secretary of labor, 
who recently converted an old church in down- 
town New York into a labor temple. Settlement 
colonies, and the work of women like Jane Addams 
or men like Stelzle and Steiner, are calculated to 
usher in a new order of things. It should be made 
clear to all men who work that Christ is their 
friend and brother— that above all things He was 
industrious Himself, and that the parasite and the 
drone found no place in His vocabulary. St. Paul 
was about the most untiring worker the world has 
ever seen. He had small patience with the lazy 
man, and pronounced somewhat oracularly the 
dictum, " If any man will not work, neither shall 
he eat." The idle monk of the Middle Ages and 



50 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

the lazy parson of to-day are far from the ideals in- 
culcated by their Master. 

One of the characteristic sayings of Christ is the 
well-known quotation : " Every one that is of the 
truth heareth My voice." Truthfulness was indeed 
the very centre,, and the heart and core of His 
ideal of life. No word was oftener upon His lips 
than truth, and yet few terms are harder to define. 
The world has much to charge against Pilate that 
he " did not stay for an answer," as Bacon says, 
after he had propounded his momentous question. 
As a matter of fact, however, Christianity, here as 
elsewhere, does not concern itself with theoretical 
problems, but with practical life. Whatever truth 
may be, we all know what it means to lie. Of 
the three ordinary forms of lying — exaggeration, 
equivocation and hypocrisy — the last named re- 
ceived the most severe condemnation of the Master. 
" Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " 
preceded the most scathing denunciation which 
ever fell from His lips. Throughout Holy Writ 
there is shown this same feeling towards deception. 
The adversary himself is styled the Father of Lies, 
and the part of all liars is said to be in the lake of 
fire. Perhaps this worst of all vices is likewise 
most common. Sometimes the adversary hides 



FIKST IDEAL— KIGHTEOUSNESS 51 

himself so speciously behind the garb of truth that 
it is hard to note his presence. The oft debated 
question, Is a lie ever justifiable? illustrates this 
fact. The man who studies up excuses for the justi- 
fication of falsehood had better be engaged in 
other business. No wrong is ever justifiable in the 
abstract sense ; though, in a concrete case, between 
two evils the rational and moral rule is to choose 
the lesser. Nothing is more needed to-day than a 
revival of truthfulness — not only that love of 
abstract truth which is indispensable in the scien- 
tist, but also that practical devotion to truth in the 
every-day affairs of life, which makes the good 
citizen. Yery wisely indeed did one of earth's 
greatest thinkers say, " No pleasure is comparable 
to the standing on the vantage ground of truth." 

Following industry and truthfulness in the ideal 
of righteousness, the Great Teacher touched upon 
problems dealing with those monumental sources of 
legal and moral confusion, the relations of the 
sexes, and the questions of property ownership and 
relations. Human life as we see it, on the material 
side, is concerned with only two things, nutrition 
and reproduction ; or in other words, the preserva- 
tion of the individual and the preservation of the 
race. Progress upward in the scale of existence 



52 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

has always meant greater interest in and care for 
the individual ; but it has also, by virtue of that 
fact, advanced in no less degree the welfare of the 
race. The functions of reproduction give rise to 
all problems involving the home, — marriage, di- 
vorce, fatherhood, motherhood, the relations of the 
child to parent, and the like. In regard to mar- 
riage, Christ's teaching seems perfectly clear. He 
began His ministry by attending a marriage feast ; 
He blessed little children and called them unto 
Him ; He asserted constantly the binding character 
of the marriage vow. His followers reasserted and 
practiced the teachings of their Master. Paul, 
while probably unmarried himself, asserts in the 
main the beneficence of the institution, and nowhere 
condemns it. John draws his most striking picture 
of the heavenly kingdom from the marriage rela- 
tion, — "the New Jerusalem coming down from 
God out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned for 
her husband " ; while the culmination of his pro- 
phetic vision is the marriage supper of the Lamb. 
Paul uses the same figure in speaking of the Corin- 
thian Church and its relation to Christ. In his 
first letter to the Church at Corinth he goes so far 
as to assert his privilege to marry, as the other 
apostles had done, designating Cephas in particular. 
The incontestability of the marriage of the leader 



FIRST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 53 

of the twelve is of course clear. After the apostolic 
days, attempts were made to base a celibate life 
upon the teachings of Christ. Considerations of 
prudence led one of the great churches of Christen- 
dom to this position regarding the priesthood, 
though it at the same time exalted marriage among 
the laity, elevating the marriage rite to the dignity 
of a sacrament. Skeptical authors, as, for example, 
Schopenhauer, have made much of the celibacy of 
Christ, as has also Tolstoi, among nineteenth cen- 
tury writers. A fair-minded survey of the Naza- 
rene's teaching, however, will show unhesitating 
approval rather than any sort of discounting of the 
institution of marriage. 

The position taken by Christ in regard to the 
binding force and solemnity of the marriage vow is 
likewise very clear. In the Sermon on the Mount 
He even went so far as to place adultery back of 
the act in the unclean gloatings of the mind. The 
Mosaic legislation regarding any violation of the 
marriage vow was exceedingly severe. Adultery 
received the same punishment as murder, and the 
crime was never condoned, even in the case of a 
national hero like David. Many of the proverbs 
are directed against this sin, and the prophets al- 
ways used it as a type of the worst national apos- 
tasy. In modern times, the sin of adultery has 



54 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

been much condoned in civil legislation, though 
never in the teaching of the Church. As a crime 
against the family, it ranks, from the Christian 
point of view, in the same category with murder 
against the individual, and treason against the state. 
No excuse, however plausible, can justify it. 

The problem of divorce has caused much more 
debate than the problem of adultery. Easy di- 
vorce, it is recognized, strikes at the very heart of 
the home ; while on the other hand, difficult di- 
vorce seems to encourage the even greater evil of 
adultery, or at least an unhappy home life. Christ's 
famous pronouncement upon the inviolability of 
the marriage relation must be understood, like the 
other passages in the sermon, as an ideal to be real- 
ized as soon as possible, but perhaps as difficult of 
immediate realization as the famous doctrine of 
non-resistance. Ideally speaking, marriage admits 
of no dissolution ; practically speaking, such a doc- 
trine might work in the body politic more harm 
than good. What God hath joined together man 
cannot put asunder, but not every petty squire or 
village parson wields the sceptre of the Almighty. 
The true solution of the problem lies in educating 
people to the dignity and sanctity of the marriage 
relation, throwing proper safeguards around it, and 
never making it a jest or a matter of careless indif- 



FIRST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 55 

ference. Proper care in regard to marriage will 
soon solve the whole problem of divorce. 

Christ's teachings in regard to the home life 
involved the following considerations: (1) He 
approved the home as an institution; (2) He 
inculcated the primary ethical principle of justice 
as coming first in the ideal home; (3) After 
justice, and as including it, He insisted upon the 
higher law of love ; and (4) He did not believe in 
that narrow conception of the family which negates 
the altruistic spirit. Charity with Him began at 
home, but it did not end there. Those who did His 
will were in the larger and truer sense His nearest 
relatives. The spiritual relationship, while above 
the natural, did not, however, negate the latter. In 
heaven they neither marry nor are given in mar- 
riage ; but on earth, marriage is divine, and bears 
the seal of the approval of God. The happiest 
home is none the less the one which is least self- 
centred, and which extends farthest beyond its own 
narrow boundaries. 

One of the chief sins condemned by Christ, as 
well as by the later church authorities, was the 
vice of fornication. While regarded more leniently 
than adultery by the Jews, it was severely de- 
nounced. It is one of those evils which only 
thorough education and training can remove. Per- 



56 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

haps no sin is more detrimental to the high ideals 
held up by Christ than fornication. No crime 
serves so effectually to coarsen and degrade a man 
as this double offense against both manhood and 
womanhood. All sin is essentially animal, but 
fornication is the most animal of all sins. Chris- 
tianity teaches universally the single standard in 
morals, and demands that purity of heart and life 
from man which man has always demanded from 
woman. The operation of ordinary evolution 
makes men truthful rather than chaste, and women 
chaste rather than truthful. Christianity, how- 
ever, says to man, u Be thou chaste " ; and to 
woman, " Be thou truthful." Sexual purity, both 
of man and woman, is essential to good health, good 
morals, good civilization and good religion. 

The Christ ideal in regard to property rights may 
be summarized under three divisions : (1) honesty, 
illustrated by His discourses against theft, His en- 
dorsement of the Mosaic doctrine upon the subject 
and His prompt payment of tribute ; (2) the proper 
estimate of wealth; and (3) the proper use of 
material resources. 

In attempting a digest of His teaching regarding 
the second division, we are confronted by abundant 
material. From the time the devil tempted Him 



FIRST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 57 

to no purpose with the enormous bribe of all the 
kingdoms of the earth, down to the time when 
Judas betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver, His 
supreme disregard for mere money, as money, 
becomes apparent. We are not to suppose, how- 
ever, that Christ despised business, or that He con- 
demned trade. His greatest apostle advised the 
early disciples to "be not slothful in business," and 
worked with his own hands as a craftsman ; and the 
Teacher of Nazareth Himself began life as a car- 
penter. Business, to Christ, was the same as any 
other calling ; but the purposeless accumulation of 
money, or of any sort of material possessions, He 
regarded as the supremest folly. Christ's estimate 
of material wealth was based entirely upon its in- 
fluence for or against the development of the spir- 
itual life. 

In regard to the third division Christ speaks in 
no uncertain tones. Whenever wealth is used to 
negate the spiritual life, it is abused. Because it is 
so difficult to avoid this abuse, He is inclined to 
regard the rich man as more unfortunate than the 
poor man. In the parable of the rich man and 
Lazarus, Dives has decidedly the more undesirable 
side of the bargain. And Dives's sin is not that 
he has been a thief, a murderer or an adulterer, but 
that his wealth has closed his heart to charity and 



58 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

built up within his soul the hell of the selfish life. 
Between him and Lazarus there is a great gulf fixed 
— the impassable gulf between the selfish and the 
unselfish soul. The possession of wealth among 
the early Christians seems to have been rather 
unusual. In the first community at Jerusalem, 
Barnabas and others sold their property and gave 
the proceeds to the Church. They did this, it is 
distinctly stated, not in obedience to any regulation 
upon the subject, but solely because they believed 
it was what Christ would have done under the same 
circumstances. Christ's doctrine in regard to prop- 
erty and material possessions is best understood by 
keeping in mind His general concept of the supreme 
reality and worth of the spiritual life. 

In the natural order of things, the question of 
property rights leads to the consideration of Chris- 
tian citizenship. One of the most striking things 
about Christianity is its doctrine of civil obedience. 
To respect the law was among the very first of the 
duties inculcated by the Man of Galilee. No one 
could have been more punctual in his obedience to 
civil authority. His ideas in this respect ran parallel 
to those of Socrates. The early Christians were 
scrupulous in their observance of law, with the sole 
exception of religious conflict. The general atti- 



FIRST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 59 

tucle of Christ towards civil innovations was one of 
evolution, rather than of iconoclasm. He hurled 
no polemics at slavery, despotism, cruel punish- 
ments or female degradation ; but all these things 
have melted away beneath the influence of His 
teaching. So far as any outward expression is con- 
cerned, no one can authoritatively say whether 
Christ was a monarchist, a republican or a socialist. 
Had He lived under any of these forms of govern- 
ment, He would doubtless have yielded quiet and 
law-abiding submission. Of one thing only are we 
assured in regard to His politics, and that is that 
He believed in obeying the law. Christianity was 
once accused of being radical upon political ques- 
tions — now it is generally attacked because of 
its conservatism. Modern socialism opposes the 
Church ofttimes because of its alliance with estab- 
lished custom. With the red flag type of either 
anarchism or socialism, Christianity has indeed 
nothing to do. With the entrenched power of so- 
cial or political corruption, it has even less. As 
regards political questions of the present day, the 
function of the Christian is first ethical, and second 
intellectual. In other words, every Christian is 
under obligation to stand first for clean morals, re- 
gardless of other considerations, and second for in- 
dividual political judgment. Business comes before 



60 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

party with the ward-heeler and the saloon-keeper, 
and morality ought to come before party with the 
Christian. 

Perhaps the most comprehensive term included 
under the ideal of righteousness is that of tem- 
perance. The word temperance has been much 
abused. Sometimes it has been used to include 
practically all of the virtues of the human charac- 
ter, sometimes it has been so narrowed as to apply 
only to total abstinence from the use of alcoholic 
beverages. As we shall use it here, its violation 
will include the following things : (1) the abuse of 
naturally good impulses ; (2) the use of artificial 
and injurious agencies ; and (3) the misuse of arti- 
ficial but, under certain circumstances, helpful 
articles. Under the first head come all sorts of 
perversion of naturally good impulses and passions, 
such as (a) the appetite for food, (b) the desire to 
care properly for the person, and (c) the sexual im- 
pulse. These desires are good, and tend to happi- 
ness of life, when properly controlled and regulated. 
When abused, however, there are no more certain 
avenues to misery, destruction and death. The 
second class includes the use of all artificial drugs 
which are not naturally intended for food or drink. 
Most stimulants and narcotics come under this class, 



FIEST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 61 

especially alcohol and opium. No slavery is more 
galling and complete than that which these agencies 
establish ; while aside from the injury done the 
body, they dethrone the will and make the man 
a moral wreck. The third class refers to those 
agencies which are perhaps not especially harmful 
in themselves, nor individually destructive to some 
who partake of them. Their general use, however, 
would lead to bad results, and in. specific cases to 
destruction and ruin. In regard to these articles, 
which include among others the less harmful nar- 
cotics, the Christian must determine whether or 
not the law of liberty is overbalanced by the law of 
service. " If meat make my brother to offend," I 
should dispense with meat. My brother's spiritual 
welfare is worth more than the gratification of my 
carnal appetite. Here, as elsewhere, the higher 
and more important considerations should have 
precedence over the lower. 

Two other virtues which enter into the concept 
of righteousness as Christ used it, but which we can 
do no more than name, as having been in substance 
already included, are the fine old doctrine of rev- 
erence, and the superb and in a certain sense in- 
clusive virtue of loyalty. Reverence is as closely 
allied to humility as loyalty is to duty, so that we 



62 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

need not discuss them further. The man who is 
humble need not be taught the meaning of rever- 
ence, and the disciple of duty will find it easy to 
be loyal. All true virtues are related, but there is 
an especially close affinity existing between these 
kindred excellences. 

It is not to be presumed that this analysis ex- 
hausts the content of Christ's teaching regarding 
the individual. It is safe to say, however, that the 
man or woman who thoroughly understands His 
doctrine with reference to these things will not go 
far wrong regarding anything else. It is also safe 
to say that any approximation, even, in the way of 
realizing His ideals in this field would work a 
transformation in the world. Herein consists the 
supreme utility of the preacher. Upon him, more 
than any one else, is imposed the burden of being 
one who holds great moral ideals up before the peo- 
ple. When he preaches the Gospel, this is what he 
preaches, at least in very large measure. The 
Gospel is only secondarily a matter of church forms 
or theologies. Primarily, it is a teaching regard- 
ing life ; it deals with men's every-day behavior ; it 
is a great moral influence and power. The 
preacher who proclaims the Gospel will preach 
these things a large part of his time. Christ's final 



FIRST IDEAL— RIGHTEOUSNESS 63 

word to His chief lieutenant was not evangelization, 
as much as He emphasized the latter, but pastoral 
care. " Feed My lambs." " Feed My sheep." 
"Feed My sheep." These words must not be held 
to negate the evangelizing features of the Great 
Commission, but must always be considered in con- 
nection with them. 

As we meditate more and more upon the crystal 
perfection of the Christ ideal of righteousness, we 
are led to say with Sidney Lanier : 



" But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, 
But Thee, O poets' Poet, wisdom's Tongue, 
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, 
O perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest — 
What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, 
"What least defect or shadow of defect, 
What rumor, tattled by an enemy, 
Of inference loose, what lack of grace 
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's — 
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, 
Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ f " 



II 

THE SECOND GKEAT IDEAL OF CHEIST 
— SERVICE 

THE first great ideal of Christ was the 
supreme ideal of the individual life, the 
goal of personal righteousness. Next 
to, and of equal importance with this goal, He 
enunciated the great social ideal, the gospel of 
service. It found expression in many of the best 
known phrases of the Sermon on the Mount, and 
afterwards in such utterances as : " The Son of Man 
came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and 
to give His life a ransom for many ; " and " He that 
would be greatest among you, let him become the 
servant of all." The rich young ruler is not only 
told to obey the Commandments, but he is also in- 
structed, " Sell all thou hast and give it unto the 
poor " — that is, become obedient to the law of 
service. And it is just this ideal of service which 
has proven, more than anything else about Chris- 
tianity, the leavening power of the world. It in- 
spired Francis of Assisi to become the veritable 
saint of mediaeval Christendom. It made possible 
64 



SECOND IDEAL— SERVICE 65 

the work of Florence Nightingale and John 
Howard, and Frances Willard and Clara Barton, 
and the other servants of the world since the time 
of the Christ Himself. It has lightened the 
burdens of the poor, built hospitals for the sick, 
helped to soothe the misery of the blind and the 
afflicted, and in a thousand ways softened the sor- 
rows of the world. The ideal of service has made 
physicians willing to run every sort of risk in order 
to discover some means of fighting disease, that 
humanity might be benefited thereby. It has 
made missionaries willing to become martyrs, and 
has transformed commonplace men and women 
into veritable heroes and heroines. It inspired the 
Beatrice of Dante, and the Cordelia and Desdemona 
and Imogen of Shakespeare, and the Blessed Damo- 
zel of Rosetti, and the Eugenie Grandet of Balzac, 
and the Pompilia of Robert Browning. It was the 
ideal of service which caused Alice Cary to write 
that sweetest of American lyrics of duty, the lines 
known to every schoolboy : 

" True worth is in being, not seeming, — 
In doing, each day that goes by, 
Some small good, not in dreaming 
Of great things to do by and by ; 
For whatever men say in their blindness, 
And spite of the fancies of youth, 
There is nothing so kingly as kindness, 
And nothing so royal as truth.' ' 



66 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

It was the ideal of service which inspired even so 
rebellious a writer as Byron to say : 

" The drying up of a single tear has more 
Of honest fame, than shedding seas of gore." 

It was back, too, of the wild altruism of Shelley 
and the contemplative goodness of Wordsworth. 
It made John Ruskin, the greatest art critic of 
England, say that the ultimate test of a truly great 
man is always his humility — his willingness to 
serve. It inspired the Madonnas of Raphael and 
the frescoes of Michael Angelo, and it wrote itself 
in stone in the cathedrals of the Renaissance and 
the hospitals and foundling asylums of the modern 
age. It is back of our laws for the protection of 
the needy, and it is the heart and core of the best 
that is in our modern civilization. He who would 
take Christian altruism, the ideal of service, out of 
the world, would plunge it into chaos and darkness, 
and make it a hotbed of debauchery and crime. 

The ground of this doctrine of service was em- 
phasized by the Great Teacher as the essential 
fatherhood of God and the consequent brotherhood 
of man. This teaching was especially foreign and 
repugnant to Christ's own people. Jehovah, to the 
Jew, was a national Deity, who had no regard for 
the heathen, and showered His blessings upon His 



SECOND IDEAL— SERVICE 67 

peculiar people alone. The Canaanite, the Amal- 
ekite, the Gentile, the Samaritan, were not in any 
sense brothers to the Jew. The hardest battle 
which Christianity had to fight in Judea was clue 
to this inherent racial exclusiveness. The parable 
of the Good Samaritan was the most difficult lesson 
of all for a Jew to accept. So it came about that 
the first schism in the early Church was due to this 
prejudiced racial and national feeling. Service, al- 
truism, was, however, the lesson upon which the 
Great Teacher insisted most strenuously. "The 
Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to 
minister," was the watchword of His life. Again, 
He said to the wrangling disciples, " I am among 
you as he that serveth." In His picture of the Last 
Judgment, the ultimate test is the life of service. 
The final requirement, as we have seen, laid upon 
the rich young ruler, is the requirement of serv- 
ice. Dives, in the parable of the rich man and 
Lazarus, is lost because he will not serve. From 
His first sermon at Nazareth to His last consoling 
words uttered to the thief upon the cross, the motto 
of Christ was the motto which was so worthily se- 
lected after wards as the watchword of the greatest 
kingdom of modern times— "Ich Dien" (I serve). 

The highest title which Christ ever claimed was 
that of the Son of Man. In this one phrase was 



68 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

embodied His conception of the sublime dignity of 
service. To serve His fellow man was to Him the 
supreme honor of all. It has sometimes been 
urged that no progress would take place in the 
world if the spur of individual initiative were re- 
moved — that men will labor well only when each 
man labors for himself. But Christ put the motive 
of the common good far above this. "He that 
would be greatest among you let him become the 
servant of all," was the ideal He held up before His 
disciples. When Satan on the Mount of Tempta- 
tion held out the bribe of individual reward, he was 
promptly dismissed. When the mother of Zebe- 
dee's children desired places of honor for her sons 
in the kingdom of the Nazarene, she was told that 
His kingdom was not like the kingdoms of the 
Gentiles, but that the highest motive and reward 
which it held out was the consideration, not of self- 
advancement, but of the common good — the service 
of all. 

Was not therefore the cooperative, rather than 
the competitive principle, the basis of Christ's 
teaching? Our answer must be here as in our 
study of the Sermon on the Mount — as an ideal, 
yes. Are we ready to substitute cooperation for 
competition ? That depends. This much, however, 
is certainly true. " The survival of the fittest " is 



SECOND IDEAL— SERVICE 69 

not the law of Christ's kingdom. The most funda- 
mental revolution which His teaching involved was 
due to His substitution of the law of altruism for 
the law of selfish competition. The world up to 
Christ had developed along the lines of egoism and 
the struggle for existence. The world from Christ 
on to the Millennium will develop along the lines 
of altruism and the common weal. Christianity is 
essentially individualistic in philosophy, but altru- 
istic in life. It puts man first in the universe ; it 
makes his soul worth more than a material world ; 
but it teaches likewise the solidarity of men. From 
its point of view the individual soul that is worth 
while is the soul that lives for all. God is the one 
great soul because He lives thus in the fullest sense ; 
and we become Godlike just in proportion as our 
souls grow larger and embrace the service of all. 

That the ground of service and the dignity of 
service are fundamental principles of Christianity 
admits of no dispute. When, however, we come to 
the question of the proper expression of the altruis- 
tic spirit, we have a different problem before us. 
Good intentions alone never afforded permanent 
help to any one ; and good intentions, backed even 
by material but misdirected resources, sometimes 
do more harm than good. It is no easy matter to 
give away money properly, as many wealthy and 



TO VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

well-intentioned men have found out. As a pre- 
requisite of all true service, Christ demands the 
spirit of love first of all. Any other motive ren- 
ders the service, if not valueless entirely, at least 
profitless to the giver. In addition to the true 
spirit of service, He demands a rational and intelli- 
gent direction of effort. No specific laws are laid 
down to govern this direction, it being essential 
that it should change in its expression from age to 
age. In Christ's time, individual relief, such as 
was afforded by the Good Samaritan, was, in a ma- 
terial way, the only means by which service could 
be rendered. It would seem that with a more en- 
lightened civilization, individual charity might well, 
in large measure, give place to cooperative relief. 
In any case, it should not be forgotten that the 
true service is always, not simply providing for 
physical needs, but rather in helping to build up 
nobility of character. The charity which makes a 
man less a man is almost if not entirely as great 
a sin as the altogether uncharitable spirit. No 
greater crime can be committed against the soul of 
a man than to make a pauper of him. To do so, 
with whatever good intentions, is not to serve him, 
but to injure him. Society has much for which to 
answer because of mistakes in this direction. Main- 
taining too often a false system of feudal supremacy 



SECOND IDEAL— SERVICE 71 

which gave unjust privileges to the few, and de- 
prived the many of their just rights, it has striven 
to make up for the wrong by a mistaken system of 
benevolence, which builds almshouses for victims 
of injustice, and feeds soup in winter to people un- 
able, but anxious to earn their bread. The world 
has at times played both knave and fool. Having 
climbed out of knavery in the matter of service, it 
is time also that it should cease to play the fool. 

We find, therefore, that two principles must gov- 
ern our efforts if we are to serve the world as Christ 
would have us : first, the spirit of love ; and second, 
the spirit of rational direction. In endeavoring 
to help others we should always remember that 
soul values have precedence over material con- 
siderations ; but that bodily relief is the necessary 
prerequisite of everything else. It is useless to 
preach to people when they are hungry or lack 
the physical necessities of life. We should remem- 
ber also that the best way to help others is to enable 
them to help themselves ; and that there is no war- 
rant in Christ's teaching for indiscriminate, that is 
unintelligent, charity. Such charity is indeed the 
poorest service of all. Finally, we need to remem- 
ber that all schemes of social reconstruction are 
valuable only in so far as they guarantee individual 
betterment. The individual is the unit in the 



72 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

Christian economy, — the unselfish individual it is 
true, but still the individual. Only the soul whom 
the spirit of service and love has made one with the 
universe, so that every sorrowing creature of God 
has his interest and sympathy, is completely a 
Christian. 



* ' He prayeth well who loveth well 
Both man and bird and beast. 

He prayeth best, who loveth best 
All things, both great and small ; 

For the dear God who loveth us, 
He made and loveth all." 



Ill 

THE THIED GEEAT IDEAL OF CHEIST— 
FEEEDOM 

THE gospel of service, however important, 
does not of itself exhaust the content of 
Christianity. To the Mosaic code, the 
moral teaching of Moses and of Sinai, Christ added 
not only the ideal of service, but also the ideal of 
freedom. " Ye shall know the truth and the truth 
shall make you free," He told the early disciples 
who thronged about Him. There was no theme 
dearer to His heart than that of the glorious 
freedom of the Sons of God. It had been said of 
Him by the prophet of old that He should come to 
u proclaim liberty to the captive and the opening 
of the prison to them that are bound." Our free 
institutions, the great doctrine of the world-wide 
brotherhood of man, the germs of truth which 
sprang into life with the overthrow of the Bastile 
and the Ke volution of '76 — these all are but scat- 
tered rays from the great central sun, the ideal of 
freedom proclaimed and inculcated by the Christ. 
Back of the Peace Conferences, recently in session 
at the Hague, lies the parable of the Good Samari- 
73 



U VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

tan ; and back of the Constitution of the United 
States lies the Constitution of the Man of Galilee. 
It is true that despotism has sometimes ruled in the 
name of Christ, just as more than one tyrant has 
committed incest and murder in the name of 
religion ; but it is likewise true that the world has 
steadily advanced to freedom under the banner of 
the Nazarene. The freest nations upon the face 
of the globe to-day are the Christian nations. 
Freedom, therefore, no less than service, constitutes 
a watchword of Christianity. 

When Christianity came, the world was largely 
a slave camp. Greek civilization at its best pre- 
supposed the institution of slavery, and Roman 
culture was little if any better. With the disap- 
pearance of slavery as an institution in Europe, 
came the rise of the feudal system and the story of 
the serf. The misinterpreted Christianity of the 
Middle Ages and of the early Modern Era forged 
new shackles for humanity, and built dungeons 
instead of opening the doors of the prisons. The 
Bastile was reared upon the fabric of a professedly 
religious monarchy, and the torture chambers of the 
Inquisition were ruled over by priests. No tyranny 
in the history of the world has proven more un- 
bearable than the tyranny of ecclesiasticism. The 
French Revolution, with the parallel movements in 



THIRD IDEAL— FREEDOM 75 

other nations, finally burst the shackles of the 
serf and brought genuine freedom to humanity, 
Nowhere has the fundamental distinction between 
vital and formal Christianity, when the two are 
once separated, become more apparent than in 
connection with the ideal of freedom. Forms by 
nature tend to enslave, and hence the slight attention 
paid by Christ Himself to ecclesiastical organiza- 
tion. Enslavement brings with it a certain power ; 
but it is a weaker power than the force of united 
free men. Armies composed of slaves, when well 
directed, have accomplished a good deal; but 
armies composed of free men will always accom- 
plish more. Christ fought an ecclesiasticism all His 
life, attempted to found no ecclesiasticism for Him- 
self, and was put to death by an ecclesiasticism at 
last. Notwithstanding these facts, after His death 
His name became the basis for one of the most 
gigantic ecclesiastical tyrannies the world has ever 
seen, a tyranny which at one time in its history 
would have crucified Him summarily, or at least 
burned Him at the stake, if He had appeared in His 
own Church and preached His own doctrine. 

No question has been more widely discussed than 
the much vexed topic of the " freedom of the will." 
John Milton, in " Paradise Lost," pictures the 



76 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

fallen spirits debating freedom in the realm of 
Pandemonium ; and it holds a place, along with the 
immortality of the soul, as one of the two great 
problems in the philosophy of the world. It is 
quite needless to say that with the metaphysical 
question as such, we have nothing to do. Our only 
concern is to find out what Christ taught in regard 
to practical life. This would seem to be easy 
enough. It is the simplest truism in the world to 
say that the Man of Galilee never in one recorded 
utterance discounted the full measure of human 
responsibility and accountability. When He said, 
" Come unto Me," He implied that men could come. 
When He said, " Whosoever belie veth in Him shall 
not perish but have everlasting life," He implied 
again that " whosoever " included all who heard 
the words and willed to accept them. When He 
said " Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel 
to every creature, He meant that all and every were 
fitting and proper words to be used as He used 
them. The Christian, then, whether layman or 
preacher, is fully justified at all times in assuming 
three things: first, that men need to be saved; 
second, that they can be saved ; and third, that it is 
his business to try to save them. Metaphysical dis- 
cussions in regard to human accountability and the 
like are entirely out of place. The assumption of 



THIRD IDEAL—FREEDOM 77 

all religion is that men can be saved if they will, 
and it is also its assumption that they can will to 
be saved. Much futile argument has been indulged 
in regarding the relations of will and belief. A 
man cannot believe or will to believe that which 
his reason pronounces false ; but a man can and 
must will to believe in those things which are 
essential to his moral life, and in regard to which 
reason cannot pass. IngersolTs dictum that the 
most cruel words in the world are " He that be- 
lie veth not shall be damned" arose from a mis- 
apprehension of the nature of belief. Salvation or 
destruction in this world and in the next depends 
and must depend upon an act of will. To will to 
accept a high ideal of life means to will salvation. 
To refuse to will thus means to accept destruction. 
Supremely true it is that in the last analysis " We 
are the masters of our fate," and " the captains of 
our souls." 

Intellectual freedom is the last phase of the last 
great ideal of Christ. Even to-day there is much 
confusion regarding its province. Every attempt to 
bind the mind by dogma violates the principle, and 
many attempts have been made in the history of 
Christianity. The question of creed more properly 
belongs to formal Christianity, and will be treated 



78 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

when the latter comes under discussion. Nothing 
can be clearer, however, than the fact that Christ 
laid down no philosophy as a test of Christianity, 
and that He carefully avoided all questions of 
speculative dogma. He asserted that men must be- 
lieve in Him, but never in any theory of Him. He 
knew that the essential principle of His religion 
was decision of will, and not speculation concern- 
ing life. Hence He was a religious teacher, and 
not a theologian. Had He based His religion 
upon a particular philosophy, it would either have 
been unintelligible and therefore useless to all but 
the last cycle of men, or else it would have been 
outgrown in the onward march of human develop- 
ment. Therefore He proclaimed no creed save an 
affirmation of will as regards His ideal of life — 
something which will be intelligible to the last 
man who will live upon the planet, and which has 
been intelligible since He first preached it by the 
shores of Galilee. It is sufficient, and it cannot be 
outgrown. His followers, however, were not so 
wise. From the very first, they began to interpret 
His message philosophically, and demand unhesitat- 
ing obedience to each successive interpretation. 
Hence the long list of weather-beaten and storm- 
shattered creeds which strew the shores of Time. 
To-day, we are surely outgrowing the creedal 



THIRD IDEAL— FREEDOM 79 

stage ; and it will not be long before that absolute 
freedom of thought which Christ came to proclaim 
will be guaranteed by all of His followers. A 
caution at this point should not be neglected. 
Thinking and decision are by do means one. A 
man should think a great deal and decide com- 
paratively little. Much thought will hurt no one, 
so long as he carefully controls his will and selects 
only with the greatest caution the roving ideas 
which range before him. He must think freely 
and honestly if he is to think in the true sense at 
all ; but he will utterly ruin his career if he at- 
tempts to precipitate his life and destiny in the 
direction of every wandering thought. Multum 
non multa must be his rule as regards decision 
and action. 

We are inclined, I think, at times to forget that 
the Christ ideal, the building up of the lives of 
purity, of service and of freedom among men, is the 
real essence of the Master's teaching. Nothing is 
clearer, however, than that this is the object and 
goal of the Christ, and that other things, matters of 
organization and the like, are only means to the end 
proposed. And to-day, no matter how many names 
a church may count upon its roll, it has only as 
many Christians as it has people who are trying to 
develop the ideals of righteousness, of service and 



80 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

of freedom in their lives. These are the ultimate 
essentials, and other things are necessarily subsidiary 
to them. 

The religion of Christ has had many martyrs. 
Some have died for the cause of righteousness, 
some have won their crowns trying to realize the 
ideal of service ; but the sacred name of freedom 
has claimed the greatest host of all. Axe and 
fagot and rack have been used to crush this latest 
and fairest flower of the ages, but it blooms 
securely, despite all efforts to kill it. 

" They never fail who die 
In a great cause. The block may soak their gore ; 
Their heads may sodden in the sun ; their limbs 
Be stniDg to city gates or castle walls ; 
But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years 
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom, 
They but augment the great and sweeping thoughts 
That overspread all others, and conduct 
The world at last to freedom." 



(b) The Future 



IY 

THE FUNCTION OF THE SUPEKNATUK AL * 
IN CHKIST'S TEACHING 

C HEIST'S teaching, while supremely prac- 
tical, and in no respect other-worldly, using 
the term in the monastic sense, looked 
constantly to the future. Future and present were 
indeed one to Him. He saw everything in its 
eternal relations, or as Spinoza long after said, 
" sub specie etemitatis." To one with this point of 
view, the present, while important in its bearings 
upon the future, possessed little significance con- 
sidered by itself. What were thirty-three years of 
life worth, when compared with an infinite past, 
and a no less infinite future ? Hence the trivial 
things which usually cause men so much anxiety 
never disturbed the equanimity of the Nazarene. 
"What did it amount to whether He had a bed or 
not, for one night out of one year out of an un- 

1 The word " supernatural ' ' is now much tabooed. We have 
found no other popular expression, however, which quite takes 
its place. The sense in which the term is used is fully explained 
in the latter part of the present chapter. 
81 



82 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

counted number of years? Still less important 
than a bed was the idea of accumulating money, in 
a world which existed to Him for only thirty-three 
years. Material money does not circulate in Eter- 
nity, and hence the significance of the passage, 
" Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, 
where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where 
thieves break through and steal ; but lay up for 
yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth 
nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not 
break through nor steal." Christ's teaching in re- 
gard to the future world has, however, proven the 
crux of His system with many. Over against the 
credulous man, who delights in miracles for their 
own sake, is the dyed-in-the-wool skeptic who, like 
David Hume, argues that no amount of evidence 
can prove a miracle. Very few people outside of 
the ultra-ignorant or the ultra-perverse will dispute 
the logic of Christ's teaching in regard to practical 
living ; but many people who accept this will not 
believe that He walked on the water, or rose from 
the dead. But even for these people, the question 
of the future life will not down. Every time they 
stand beside the grave it occurs ; and not a single 
day passes without some suggestion of its presence. 
Christ's answer may not suit them, but some answer 
they must give to the question. The gloomy solu- 



FUNCTION OF THE SUPERNATURAL 83 

tion of the agnostic recognizes the validity of the 
problem no less than the teaching of the Gospels 
recognizes it. At least one-half of the writings of 
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John deal with it, and 
the proportion is certainly not beyond what it de- 
serves. There can be no vital and permanent 
Christianity which does not include its doctrine of 
the future life. 

Many theologies have been based upon the ref- 
erences contained in the Gospels to the supernatural, 
and to the life beyond the grave. With these, as 
was stated in the section touching upon moral free- 
dom, in a speculative way, we have nothing to do. 
The religion of Christ does not theorize in regard 
to the supernatural at all. Very positive assertion 
is made concerning it, but there is no attempt at 
any specific explanation. Paul very wisely left 
the third heaven wrapped in mystery. The folly 
of attempting to explain the inexplicable was very 
apparent, not only to Christ, but also to His closest 
followers. But although unexplained, the idea of 
a belief in the supernatural is vital to the Christian 
religion. Take this away, and Christ sinks at once 
to the level of Plato or Socrates, or Zeno or Con- 
fucius. But were He no greater than these, He 
could not have built the mighty fabric of modern 
Christendom. The miracle of Christianitv without 



84 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

the miraculous is greater by far than any miracle 
it contains. The differentiating quality of all re- 
ligion is indeed its belief in the supernatural A 
purely naturalistic religion is in all essential re- 
spects a contradiction in terms. Naturalistic ethics 
there may be, as well as naturalistic metaphysics, 
and naturalistic science of every kind ; but a nat- 
uralistic religion is as contradictory a phrase as the 
English language contains. Religion in its essence 
deals with this life, but also with something beyond. 
The existence of a Power mightier than we are, 
and to which we stand in some way related, is a 
fundamental postulate of all religions. Religion, 
deprived of this postulate, becomes either a species 
of ethics or metaphysics, in accordance with the 
manner in which the practical or the theoretical 
has previously predominated. It was one of the 
greatest merits of Mr. Herbert Spencer that he 
clearly saw this fundamental characteristic of the 
religious concept. Mr. Huxley, too, was never 
more completely at his best than when puncturing 
the " Religion of Humanity " as fathered by Comte 
and Frederic Harrison. No attempt at formulat- 
ing a religious movement was in fact a more gro- 
tesque failure than Comte's worship of the " Grand 
Etre." Positivism as a religion appealed to the 
human race far less than Mormonism or Christian 



FUNCTION OF THE SUPERNATURAL 85 

Science, or even the Zionistic movement of John 
Alexander Dowie. This too, in spite of the fact 
that many brilliant men and women lent their sup- 
port to the new system of Comte. But Positivism 
did away with the supernatural, and in so doing, 
completely gave up the case for any sort of real 
religion. Comte's system contains some ethics, and 
may with a degree of caution be styled a meta- 
physic ; but it is absurdly incorrect for it to regard 
itself as a religion. There can be no real religion 
without a supernatural content, and when that con- 
tent is elbninated, such religion as there was dies 
with it. The Polynesian who worships idols, and the 
Chinaman who burns joss have yet in a crude way 
some sort of religion ; but the most refined Positiv- 
istic Society in the world, however superior in 
ethics and culture, has none. 

We would not for a moment detract from the 
value of whatever contribution the followers of 
Comte, or others, have made to the world's better- 
ment. We would not, either, attack or fail to give 
credit to the man who acknowledges the content 
of Christ's message as regards the here and now, 
but refuses to go any farther. Much of the sub- 
stance of the Christian religion is purely ethical, 
and the man who accepts the Christian ethic with- 
out accepting anything else can hardly fail to re- 



86 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

ceive some benefit thereby. All that we care to 
emphasize at this point is that Christ's ethics, while 
included in His religion, does not by any means ex- 
haust it. The Christian religion is essentially 
based upon a belief in the supernatural, not only 
because it is Christian, but also because it is a re- 
ligion. Had Christ spoken no word concerning 
the future, the consoling power of the Christian 
symbols would have been swept away, and that 
halo of light which Christianity has thrown around 
the grave would have been entirely dissipated. 
The consoling and comforting features of the relig- 
ion of the Kazarene have been among the greatest 
blessings it has conferred upon the human race. 
If the physician who discovers a great anaesthetic, 
which relieves bodily suffering, or the surgeon who 
finds some new means for the perfecting of his art, 
deserves the plaudits of humanity, assuredly a 
religion which has soothed the mental auguish of 
millions and which provides the only effective balm 
in the most extreme cases of despair and suffering, 
is worthy of consideration and respect. 

The supernatural is obviously a difficult subject 
to discuss. We are fully aware that the very title 
opens the way to all sorts of mental vagaries, 
and that it covers the most fantastic absurdities. 
Where science no longer treads, there is great 



FUNCTION OF THE SUPERNATURAL 87 

opportunity for the imagination to play. But our 
human life, as we have seen, is hemmed in by the 
supernatural ; and the existence and reality of the 
latter are even more patent than those of the 
natural itself. Mr. Spencer recognized this in his 
assertion of the reality of the Unknowable, though 
he fell short of any proper appreciation of the 
nexus between what he styled the Unknowable and 
the Knowable. The natural is indeed only a part 
of the supernatural, and the two are concentric 
circles rather than separate spheres. More and 
more of the supernatural is being conquered as the 
world marches on ; and were not the conquest an 
infinite task, we should say that at some time it 
will all be conquered, and the two circles coincide. 
God, the supreme reality, is, however, infinite, and 
so the realization of Him becomes the infinite 
problem of the good life. Ever our horizon 
broadens, ever we come to know more of Him, 
ever the known pushes on into the unknown, ever 
we voyage on into those " strange seas of thought " 
which Wordsworth mentioned in his characteriza- 
tion of Newton. 

Thus it becomes us to realize that relation with 
the infinite which is our divine inheritance, and 
which alone constitutes us men. Because the 
Teacher of Galilee recognized as no other authority 



88 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

the supreme reality of the spiritual life, because 
He saw the glory of the ideal and gave it the fore- 
most place in His thought and conduct, because He 
taught as no other ever taught the true relationship 
of the human and the divine, therefore, the religion 
of Christ has won that high position which it oc- 
cupies in . the thought and the affections of the 
world. Amid the shifting scenes of our material 
existence, He stands aloft with His calm brow and 
the surging tide of the infinite welling up through 
His words, proclaiming to all the world, in the 
message of one of His later disciples, 

u Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure." 



THE NATUEE AND CEITEEIA OF MIEACLES 

THEEE are at least six different Greek 
words used to convey the idea of miracle 
in the New Testament. These words 
simply look at different aspects of the same thing. 
At one time, a miracle is a " glorious," at another 
a " strange," at still another a " wonderful " thing. 
John uses almost exclusively the word correctly 
rendered in our American Revised text as "sign." 
In their essence, miracles were signs of God's 
power, and credentials of Christ's mission. Jesus 
Christ did not heal the sick simply to help them 
physically, nor did He raise the dead in order to 
give them a new lease on material existence. It 
was necessary that, coming as He did, He should 
have such credentials as would establish His posi- 
tion, and display such power as would fully accredit 
His claims. Hence the necessity for miracles, and 
hence their presence in the text. No better defini- 
tion of a miracle has been given than that of Bishop 
Warren : " A miracle is an effect in nature not at- 
- 89 



90 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

tributable to any of the recognized operations of 
nature, nor to the act of man, but indicative of 
superhuman power, and serving as a sign thereof." 
Miracles were very necessary as " signs " during 
Christ's presence upon earth and during the early 
history of the Church, but they are no longer 
needed for that purpose. Christianity has so justi- 
fied itself during two thousand years of history 
that it requires no further credentials. Miracles, 
indeed, present a decidedly lower order of evidence 
than examples such as are found, for instance, in a 
book like Harold Begbie's " Twice Born Men." But 
because we do not need the testimony of the miracu- 
lous now is no reason for our attacking and sneering 
at it. When a child reaches Latin or Greek, he does 
not despise his alphabet or his first English reader. 
He no longer needs them, but without them he 
would not be where he is. So with the question 
of miracles. The Church no longer needs them ; it 
has outgrown any necessity for an appeal to them 
as evidence ; but we should not forget that there 
was a time when without them there would have 
been no Church, and that the whole magnificent 
fabric of Christianity could not have been built 
originally without some such credentials. The 
conceited man may decry and look down upon the 
stages by which he reached his position of promi- 



MIRACLES 91 

nence, but the profound and reverent man will have 
only respect for the first steps in his progress up- 
ward. To make fun of miracles is cheap and easy, 
but it is no indication of either wisdom or pro- 
fundity. 

If we grant the possibility of miracles, as based 
upon superhuman power, and the necessity for them 
as credentials of such power, we do not by this ad- 
mission open the gate for the entrance of every sort 
of credulous imposture. That there are true bank- 
notes in existence does not imply that there are no 
false ones, and that such a thing as a miracle actu- 
ally took place once does not imply that it took 
place at a dozen other times. After granting the 
possibility and even the necessity for miracles as 
evidences of divine power, we do not in the slight- 
est degree remove the need for the most careful 
scrutiny in regard to specific cases of their mani- 
festation. It is readily admitted that the evidence 
here must be of the most thoroughgoing character. 
Credulity probably does, on the whole, at least as 
much harm as skepticism. The man who can ac- 
cept all of the marvels recorded of the mediaeval 
saints is as much damage to society as the man who 
refuses to believe in miracles at all. As between 
the positions of Newman and Huxley, there are 
small odds for choice. 



92 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

The whole question of miracle, like the question 
of Christianity itself, rests upon an appeal to 
reason and truth. God forbid that the time 
should ever come when reason shall abdicate her 
throne as she has upon occasions in the past, at 
the dictation of any so-called religion ! Miracles 
are rational evidences of God's power ; they have 
been needed, and they have taken place. To deny 
their possibility is to say that the Creator of the 
world is subjugated by His own creation ; to deny 
their necessity is to assert that the whole fabric of 
Christianity is absurd ; while to dispute their hav- 
ing occurred is to give the lie to the most unim- 
peachable historic testimony. Conceding the possi- 
bility of miracle, let us hear the evidence impartially 
and accept no given instance of miraculous mani- 
festation without such testimony that only a jury 
prejudged in the case could decide against its occur- 
rence. Steering between the Charybdis of credulity 
and the Scylla of skepticism, let us hold firm to the 
anchor of a true faith, grounded both in reason and 
love. 

Modern scientists have at times attacked the 
theory of miracle ; and it is not to be denied that, 
from a purely materialistic point of view, a miracle 
is an impossibility. But the purely materialistic 
point of view does away quite as effectually with 



MIRACLES 93 

God as it does with miracle. We have no idea 
whatever, as previously stated, of trenching upon 
metaphysics in our study ; but it is undoubtedly 
true that some metaphysics the Christian must 
have, and that the purely naturalistic metaphysic 
will not square for a moment with the teachings of 
Christ. The religion of Christ, therefore, can never 
be a materialistic religion, if we may be permitted 
to use such an expression, but always a spiritualistic 
or idealistic one. Materialism was, in fact, the 
point of view which the Nazarene attacked most 
vigorously. The world, meaning thereby the 
materialistic concept of life, the life of eating and 
drinking and sensual appetite, was His constant 
antithesis to the kingdom of God. In His last 
superb farewell to His followers, He elaborated 
this antithesis in the words so frequently quoted : 
" They are not of the world even as I am not of the 
world." His prayer for them was not that they 
should be taken out of the world, but that they 
should be kept from the evil which it contains. 
The Apostle Paul draws the distinction very 
beautifully in his well-known definition in the 
Epistle to the Komans : " For the kingdom of God 
is not meat and drink ; but righteousness, and 
peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." The powers of 
evil, to Christ, were embodied almost, if not en- 



94 A^ITAL CHRISTIANITY 

tirely, in the fleshly appetites. His constant teach- 
ing was that the goal of the higher life could be 
won only by crucifying the lower in the interest of 
the higher, and that the path to virtue lay along 
the line of sacrifice and self-denial. Out of the 
material to fashion the ideal, out of the human to 
bring forth the divine, out of nature to realize 
nature's God — these were the ideas which con- 
stantly occupied His attention. For the purely 
animal life, He had only the supremest contempt. 
His idea of that life was embodied in His parable 
of the rich fool, as well as His picture of Dives in 
the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. 

This point of view is coming to be recognized 
more and more as the true one by the scientists 
and investigators of our own time. The biologist, 
no less than the theologian, sees in the brute side of 
our human nature the incarnation of that evil 
which constantly bars the progress of good. He 
sees that there can be no upward movement in 
society or morals which does not presuppose the 
crushing out of the " ape and the tiger " in our dis- 
positions and appetites. That world which Christ 
opposed and stigmatized has likewise received his 
censure and disapproval. He, no less than Paul, 
realizes that to be carnally minded is death, and 
that the material appetites and the material goal 



MIRACLES 95 

are the chief hindrances to progress in the moral 
universe. 

The spiritualistic concept of the world, that 
concept which finds a place for God and the 
spiritual life, which opens to the soul a vista of its 
own splendid possibilities, which raises man from a 
helpless clod of earth to a seat at the table of the 
immortals — this is the postulate of a true science 
as fully as it is the postulate of a true religion. 
Without it, life is barren, negative and full of 
despair. Without it, conscience is a cheat and 
existence itself a delusion and a mockery. With- 
out it, man's outlook shrivels and dwarfs and nar- 
rows into nothingness at last. With it, on the 
contrary, there is a new and splendid horizon 
opened for the humblest citizen of earth, an in- 
heritance which is unfading and eternal, for the 
sake of which all of the blots and blurs of our 
human history become abundantly worth while. 
We who accept this concept may well say with 
Rabbi Ben Ezra : 



" Rejoice we are allied 
To That which doth provide 
And not partake, effect and not receive ! 
A spark disturbs our elod ; 
Nearer we hold of G<>d 
Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I 
must believe.'' 



96 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

To believe in miracle, one must believe in God. 
To believe in God, one must believe in a spiritual 
universe. The man who deifies matter and accepts 
no ultimate beyond the range of our human life and 
experience, cannot of course believe that Christ 
healed the sick or raised Lazarus from the dead. 
But the man who believes in God, that He is a 
rewarder of them that diligently seek after Him, 
will be willing to believe, upon sufficient evidence, 
that death is no barrier to the King of kings ; and 
that nature herself obeys the voice of nature's God. 
This is all that a proper doctrine of miracle implies, 
and surely this is neither irrational nor inconsistent 
with such an interpretation of the universe as is 
both scientific and sufficient. A true science is 
forever one with a true philosophy and a true 
religion. 



YI 

THE MOEAL VALUE OF CHEIST'S 0ON- 

TBIBUTION TO THE BELIEF 

IN A FUTUBE LIFE 

AS man progresses in intelligence, his interest 
in the future becomes more intense. Pre- 
sumably the lower animals concern them- 
selves with little beyond the immediate present. 
It is true that certain of the less highly developed 
forms of life possess instincts which cause them to 
provide for the future — the ant, as an example, 
lays by its store for the winter, as does the bee, 
and many other and less highly developed organ- 
isms. That there is any conscious knowledge of 
the purpose of these instincts on the part of the 
animals possessing them is exceedingly doubtful. 
It is certainly true that at the very farthest any 
idea of the future is limited to a future in time. 
Only man forms the concept of an eternal here- 
after. The progress of civilization may be very 
accurately measured by observing the influence 
which a belief in the future life has had upon the 
world. The deterrent value of such a belief is 
97 



98 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

great, but its stimulative value is still greater. It 
cannot help ennobling a man for him to believe 
that he is the bearer of an eternal destiny. Victor 
Hugo has indeed advocated the somewhat fantastic 
idea of the creation of immortality. According to 
this view, man by his own will determines whether 
he shall live hereafter or not. The man who has 
no faith will be rewarded for his lack of faith by 
having his name stricken out of the goodly circle 
of the Immortals, while the man who desires 
and believes in a future life will have it as his 
reward. 

There have been some great men who have not be- 
lieved in a future life, but they are decidedly in the 
minority. The profoundest philosophers — Plato, 
Socrates, Kant, Hegel, Berkeley, Locke ; the fore- 
most poets — Homer, Vergil, Dante, Milton, Shake- 
speare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning ; the 
best-known scientists — Bacon, Newton, Galileo, 
Kepler; the greatest statesmen — Burke, Pitt, 
Washington, Lincoln, Cromwell, and others en- 
tirely too numerous to mention, believed in a 
future life. The moral influence of a belief in 
personal immortality cannot help being prodigious. 
Some highly imaginative souls, like George Eliot, 
may wax enthusiastic over the immortality of 
fame ; but there is a touch of gloom in even 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE 99 

their enthusiasm. There can be no true optimism 
without a genuine belief in a direct personal here- 
after. 

The deterrent value of belief in a future life has 
been given clue attention at the hands of economists 
and philosophers. That such a belief lessens crime 
and encourages virtue will hardly admit of dispute. 
Humanity at large is not made up of metaphysi- 
cians or scientists, and the positivistic experiment 
ought to show the futility of trying to better con- 
ditions by an appeal to a " social future " alone. 
Deeply rooted in every individual is the desire for 
personal existence ; and the consciousness that the 
future of that existence is dependent upon the 
present gives a serious coloring to life, a coloring 
which nothing else can give. We would not for a 
moment underestimate the value of the altruistic 
spirit as applied to the future, nor would we advo- 
cate an egoism which is not in its very essence 
altruistic, even for the individual ; but we do assert 
that such an egoism is back of all true altruism, 
and that to serve others and destroy one's self is 
surely not the end of life. If this were true, just 
at the moment when the soul becomes most valu- 
able it would be lost, and nature would constantly 
cheat herself as regards moral values. Christ 
realized fully the sobering significance of a firm 



100 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

belief in the future life. " What shall it profit a 
man if he gain the whole world atfd lose his own 
soul ? " is the question which has sounded in the 
ears of many a would-be criminal and caused the 
sober second thought which closed the gates of 
crime. The world is a more decent place in which 
to live because people generally have some sort of 
faith in a future life. Let that faith be seriously 
shaken, and our criminal population will largely 
increase. The jail, the penitentiary and the gal- 
lows are of far less deterrent value than the belief 
in a future accounting before a Judge of infinite 
knowledge and unimpeachable justice. The con- 
versation between the two murderers of Clarence 
in Shakespeare's " Richard III " is a fine testimony 
to the deterrent value of religious and moral con- 
siderations, even in the case of the most hardened 
criminal. 

But the deterrent value of a belief in personal 
immortality is, as already stated, of less signifi- 
cance than its stimulative function. The great 
utility of the former applies only to the bad, but 
the value of the latter appertains to the good. 
Browning has well expressed what this belief 
meant in the dawning of the Christian art of the 
Renaissance : 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE 101 

1 Is it true that we are now, and shall be here- 
after, 
But what and where depend on life's minute? 
Hails heavenly cheer or infernal laughter 

Our first step out of the gulf or in it ? 
Shall man, such step within his endeavor, 

Man's face, have no more play and action 
Than joy which is crystallized forever, 
Or grief, an eternal petrifaction ? " 



The significance of life when seen under the " form 
of eternity " is indeed tremendous. Such a point 
of view is vitally essential to any true optimism. 
Our material existence is so brief and uncertain 
that the Cyrenaic gospel of " Eat, drink and be 
merry," with its attendant explanation, "for to- 
morrow we die," becomes the only word of 
wisdom. But Cyrenaicism has never maintained 
any serious hold upon the leaders of thought or 
action in the world. The significant things which 
have been accomplished have been achieved by 
reason of a belief in the permanent existence of 
the soul. Eo man cares much for the transient ; 
what interest it really evokes is due to a sort of 
illusionary permanence which, for the moment, is 
attached to it. The point of view of the " Gram- 
marian" is always the legitimate one for great 
achievement : 



102 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

" Others mistrust and say, ' But time escapes ! 
Live uow or never ! ' 
He said, ' What's time ? leave Now for dogs 
and apes ! 

Man has Forever.' " 



And when man believes he has Forever, and that it 
depends largely upon the Here and Now as to 
what that Forever shall be, he is the more apt to 
give attention to how he comports himself in the 
present stage of his existence. 

The chief value of Christ's contribution to the 
world's faith in personal immortality, how r ever, was 
not in His teaching, or in His philosophy, but in 
the supreme fact of His resurrection. Argument 
the world had had before in abundance. Plato 
and Socrates had furnished large contributions to 
the argumentative phase of the question, but what 
humanity needed was not argument but demonstra- 
tion, not theory but proof. Socrates had said the 
soul ought to endure, but Jesus Christ proved that 
man not only ought to have but actually has an 
immortal heritage. And so the Resurrection has 
influenced more people to believe in a future life 
than any other single motive in all history. The 
Apostolic argument, " Because He rose from the 
dead we also shall rise," is thoroughly pertinent. 
People will believe in a future life if they are as- 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE 103 

sured that one man actually and positively entered 
upon it, when they will not believe in it by reason 
of any philosophical or logical process whatever. 
Thought and fact are two different things, and the 
" ought to be " does not always coincide with the 
" is." It was this preaching of fact rather than 
theory which first won Christianity its place in the 
hearts of men. The world was surfeited upon 
theory ; the Greeks had spun it out to an endless 
length, and Paul's words were literally true : " For 
after that in the wisdom of God the world by wis- 
dom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolish- 
ness of preaching to save them that believe." The 
" foolishness of preaching " appealed to men every- 
where because it dealt with facts and not philoso- 
phies, with deeds and not simply with high-flown 
speculations. 

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ may well be 
styled the crux of Christianity. Paul, who was 
the most brilliant interpreter the new religion ever 
had, recognized this very fully, and by reason of 
this recognition, wrote the fifteenth chapter of 
First Corinthians. It is no exaggeration to say 
that there can be no Christian religion without 
faith in the Resurrection. There may be Christian 
morality, and Christian living, but no Christian re- 
ligion. Eliminate the Resurrection, and Christ 



104 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

takes His place, as already noted, with Plato, 
Socrates and Zeno, as a great teacher, but as 
nothing more. The historical phenomena presented 
by Christianity thus become inexplicable. The 
evidence in support of the Eesurrection is the 
strongest adduced for any of Christ's miracles, and 
it is impossible to explain it away without doing 
such violence to the gospel historians as to make 
their record practically worthless. Paul's question 
to King Agrippa seems pertinent, when such at- 
tempts are made : " Why is it judged incredible 
with you if God doth raise the dead ? " To those 
who believe in God, and believe in Jesus Christ as 
Lord and King, for the Lord of life not to conquer 
death would be the incredible thing. Interpreta- 
tions of the Resurrection are, of course, more or 
less varied. The vital thing is that Christ lived 
again in conscious personal existence after physical 
death, and that because He lived He still lives, and 
because He lives His followers know that they shall 
live. Questions in regard to the resurrected body 
are speculative, and for the most part profitless. 
The important point is not the " what " but the 
" that." " Christ conquered death " is all we need 
to know ; just how He conquered it may remain for 
future settlement. The trend of modern science, 
properly interpreted, is not against such a future 



BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE 105 

existence as the Resurrection asserts, but in favor 
of it. While the Resurrection must always remain 
to a certain extent in the realm of faith rather than 
in the realm of exact science, its scientific basis 
becomes the stronger as the years pass on. 



' My own dim life should teach me this, 
That life shall live forevermore, 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 
And dust and ashes all that is." 



( c ) Epilogue 

VII 

MODERN PROGRESS AND VITAL CHRIS- 
TIANITY 

" "T ^ Christianity declining ? " is the old question 
of skeptics and scoffers, and will presuma- 
bly be asked until the whole world becomes 
Christianized at the time of the Millennial Dawn. 
From the statistical point of view there can be but 
one answer. Christianity is gaining on all the 
other religious beliefs at an ever increasing rate. 
The question of the status of vital Christianity is a 
different problem, how r ever, and one w r hich statistics 
will not settle. There was a time when the 
civilized world was nominally Christian, and at 
that very time vital Christianity reached its lowest 
ebb. Measured not by statistics but by feeling the 
pulse of the age, we reach none the less the same 
conclusion. Surely and more surely Christ's great 
ideals of righteousness, service and freedom are 
being realized in the w r orld. Men are becoming 
better ; politics is cleaner ; the w T orld is getting to 
be a more comfortable place in wrhich to live. 
There are more good Samaritans in existence to- 
106 



PROGRESS AND CHRISTIANITY 107 

day than ever before. No such awful barbarities 
as death by crucifixion, or the inhuman and revolt- 
ing tortures which were every-day affairs when 
Christ lived, would be even dreamed of now. We 
have much yet to accomplish, but we are progress- 
ing with giant strides. Nor does the age show any 
perceptible tendency towards a disbelief in the 
supernatural element of Christianity. In every 
generation there are those who refuse to believe 
in a future life, or in any realm outside of the 
material ; but they are, so far as external evidence 
goes, less numerous to-day than at any other time 
in the history of civilization. The Resurrected 
Christ, no less than the Teaching Christ, holds His 
throne as He has held it in the past. As man 
develops, he must develop towards, rather than 
away from, the Infinite ; and he will therefore 
never lose faith in the supernatural. This which is 
the teaching of logic and philosophy has likewise 
been borne out in the actual records of history and 
the story of the lives of men. 

One of the striking evidences of the progress of 
vital Christianity is the world-wide extension of 
the Peace Movement during the present century. 
That the nations are slowly but surely moving 
towards that day foreshadowed in Tennyson's 
vision, when 



108 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

" The war drum tbrobb'd no longer, and the battle- 
flags were furl'd 
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the 
world," 



there can be no question. The establishment of 
the Peace Tribunal at the Hague, the settlement of 
so many recent international disputes by arbitra- 
tion, the ever-increasing sentiment in favor of the 
disarmament of nations — these things all show con- 
clusively the coming reign of the Prince of Peace. 
The ground of the Peace Movement is fundamentally 
the ideal of service. Men who desire to serve their 
fellow men will not cut each other's throats. Even 
those Christians who do not hold to the doctrine of 
non-resistance in its extreme form yet recognize its 
prevailing tendency. The religion of Mohammed 
has no more certainly relied upon war as a means 
of extending its borders than has the religion of 
Christ upon peace. The whole genius of Chris- 
tianity is opposed to strife, and while it is true that 
certain churches and churchmen in the past have 
encouraged war, they have not in so doing helped 
to realize the ideals of their Master. When Christ 
came into the world, war was the normal and 
usual condition of a nation, and peace existed only 
when the people were so exhausted that they 
could no longer struggle for supremacy. To lose 



PROGRESS AND CHRISTIANITY 109 

all of one's property in a single night, to be robbed 
of children and home, to be enslaved or subjected 
to awful physical and mental torture, were 
things which any man, no matter how prominent 
or virtuous, might constantly expect as a result of 
war. The security of individual property and the 
reign of international justice have come about in 
consequence of the dethronement of Mars, and the 
enthronement of the Christ of Galilee. 

Another evidence of the growing power of vital 
Christianity is the increased interest in benevolence 
among wealthy men of the modern world. Some 
of our great financiers and business men are still 
selfish at heart, but we are constrained to believe 
that this is not true of most of them. The richest 
men of the modern age are bending all of their 
energies to solve the problem of how they may best 
use their wealth to serve the world. A rich man 
who does not give extensively of his wealth is rare 
and becoming still rarer. Some of the scions of 
wealthy houses in America are socialists, and 
strong sympathizers with the proletariat element. 
Among the monied men of modern times there is 
coming to be more and more the recognition of the 
fact that they, like the Great Teacher, are to be- 
come the servants of all. The foremost retail mer- 
chant of our day is as notable for his interest in 



110 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

the work of the Sunday-school as he is for his busi- 
ness sagacity and success. It is sometimes said that 
the modern industrial system is but a transposition 
of the ancient feudal regime, but it is certainly true 
that there is a temper about the modern baron 
which is very different from that of his ancestor of 
the olden time. In the older age there were many 
cases of individual charity ; and much emphasis, 
most of it, however, after the beginning of the 
modern period, derived from Christ, was laid upon 
isolated benevolence ; but the modern spirit is one 
of a desire for general amelioration, and has in it a 
great deal more of the element of sympathy. The 
present-day business man is or has been, as a rule, 
himself a laborer ; he sympathizes thoroughly with 
the men under him, and thinks of their convenience 
and comfort perhaps more often than his own. 
The spirit of love and service which is the spirit of 
Christ is in his soul and is manifest in his life. 
This type of man is of course not yet universal, but 
it is becoming larger and larger in its influence and 
power as the years pass on. Its presence in the 
world is a striking proof of the extension of vital 
Christianity. 

Still another indication of the progress of Christ's 
teaching is to be found in the higher moral tone 
exhibited by political leaders of the present gener- 



PROGRESS AND CHRISTIANITY 111 

ation. Politics is still far from what it should be, 
but it is immensely better to-clay than at any pre- 
vious era in the history of society. Bribery is no 
longer condoned, and while isolated examples of 
corruption are to be found in certain communities 
and municipalities, as a whole the nations are po- 
litically cleaner than at any time in the past. In 
the United States, great reform movements, led in 
our largest state by the son of a Baptist clergyman 
and in the nation at large by a Dutch Reformed 
lay preacher and a Presbyterian elder, have been 
the striking features of the day. These men are 
all of them orthodox Christians of the highest type ; 
they are also men of unimpeachable integrity and 
moral courage. Never in the history of the Amer- 
ican people have the destinies of its citizens been in 
charge of men representing a higher type of re- 
ligion than is true to-day. Yital Christianity has, 
seemingly, at least, captured the rulers of the 
world ; and as a consequence the moral tone of all 
nations is growing constantly better. Occasional 
lapses from the reform movement are of course to 
be found, and it is not to be asserted for a moment 
that the principles of the Nazarene constitute the 
core of modern politics ; but it is none the less true 
that these principles are more powerful to-day than 
at any previous time in our history. The " Era of 



112 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

Good Stealing " is a thing of the past in the United 
States ; and it is dangerous to be dishonest, even in 
so corrupt a political municipality as that of the 
City by the Golden Gate. Tweed and his followers 
constituted a type which is looked upon with ab- 
horrence by the bulk of the American people, and 
this abhorrence grows as the years pass on. Clean 
politics is surely an indication of the presence of 
vital Christianity. 

Few things are more gratifying in the onward 
march of decency and Christianity than the disap- 
pearance of cruelty from the world. The darkest 
blot upon past history has been its awful disregard 
for human misery and suffering. The story of the 
legalized means of execution among the nations is a 
record so shocking that it haunts one like a hideous 
nightmare. AYhen one thinks that for hundreds of 
years the most enlightened nations of the ancient 
world habitually punished criminals by crucifixion, 
and that it was the lot of thousands and thousands 
of wretched beings to agonize for days in this way 
before death brought relief, he can scarcely realize 
that the people who did these things belonged to 
the same race with himself. The records of the 
French criminal system and of the frightful atroc- 
ities, which were perpetrated in the prisons of 
Paris up almost to the Revolution, are so terrible 



PROGRESS AND CHRISTIANITY 113 

as to cause the strongest and most hardened nerves 
of modern times to quail when the history is read. 
The names of Damiens and Ravaillac alone recall 
enough. One can scarcely help feeling that of all 
the demons which have ruled the earth, the most 
inexcusable and awful has been the demon of 
cruelty. No sin was more thoroughly denounced 
by the Christ than this. His spirit was the spirit 
of kindness, and the very idea of cruelty was for- 
eign to Him. Modern nations are slowly learning 
His lesson. The gallows has been abolished as an 
instrument of punishment in the leading and more 
influential American states, and the guillotine is but 
little used in France. Wherever practiced now, 
capital punishment is meted out as humanely as 
possible, and there is no effort to punish the 
wretched victim with additional tortures. The 
spirit of Him who died by the awful death of the 
cross to free men from the demon of cruelty is 
abroad everywhere in the world to-day. 

An interesting and important testimony to the 
growth of the Christian spirit in the world is the 
modern tendency towards toleration of religious 
differences, and the desire for religious unification. 
Among the Protestant churches the universal desire, 
now that individual freedom of conscience has been 
secured, is for a united Christendom. The ideal of 



114 VITAL CHRISTIANITY 

service had been beautifully illustrated in the lives 
of men like Francis of Assisi and thousands of 
others of similar temper, long before the days of 
Protestantism. It is the glory of the Reformation 
that it plead for the last great ideal of Christ, the 
ideal of freedom. But since freedom has been se- 
cured, the extreme individualism which followed in 
its train has helped to thwart the triumphant march 
of the religion of Christ. Everywhere to-day there 
is a desire for Christians of every creed or party to 
join hands and to present a solid front against the 
powers of evil. Greater toleration in regard to 
opinions, and greater breadth of sympathy for all 
mankind, are the prevailing characteristics of pres- 
ent-day Christendom. Great movements in both 
the social and the religious world are presaged by 
this undercurrent of sympathy which is bearing all 
of Christ's followers more and more towards Christ. 
Baring-Gould's stirring hymn expresses the vision 
of a practically unanimous Christendom : 

" Like a mighty army, 
Moves the Church of God ; 
Brothers, we are treading 
Where the saints have trod j 
We are not divided, 
All one body we, 
One in hope and doctrine, 
One in charity." 



PART III 
Formal Christianity 



CEEED 

THE question of formal Christianity, or the 
organization and nature of the Church as 
an institution, involves three things : first, 
the subject of creed, or what one must believe; 
second, the subject of ordinance, or what one must 
do ; and third, the subject of polity, or how one 
must be governed. These three items, creed, 
ordinance and polity, cover practically the whole 
field of church organization and relations. 

The question of creed, by common consent, stands 
first of the trinity, both in time and importance. 
"What must a man believe in order to belong to the 
Church ? is a problem over which there has been 
endless argument and which has caused the most 
wide-spread dissension. It is not in any sense our 
purpose to attempt an analysis of the historic creeds 
of Christendom ; still less is it our purpose to attempt 
the defense of any particular one of them. Cer- 
tainly the Church as originally established must 
have had some creed. We find, for example, in the 
Acts of the Apostles, a number of instances of 
conversion to Christianity. The people who were 
117 



118 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

thus converted must have professed some belief 
before their admission to the Church. If, therefore, 
we discover the standard of faith which these people 
professed, surely such a creed should be sufficient to 
serve as the bearer of vital Christianity to-day. Our 
one purpose, then, must be to discover just what in 
New Testament days a convert was compelled to 
believe in order to be a Christian. Any creed con- 
taining less than this will assuredly lack Apostolic 
authority ; any creed containing more than this will 
bind to a greater degree than vital Christianity 
demands. Assuredly the creed of the Apostolic 
days may well be regarded as the ideal creed of the 
religion of Christ. 

The problem, looked at from this point of view, 
is both easy and difficult. Easy, because the con- 
fession of the early Church is frequently given in 
the New Testament ; difficult, because it is always 
given in such brief compass. The first confession 
of Christianity was that of the Apostle Feter, as re- 
corded in the sixteenth chapter of Matthew — " Thou 
art the Christ, the Son of the Living God." The 
apparently interpolated confession of the eunuch 
in the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles 
says practically the same thing. In a number of 
other cases, it is simply announced that converts 
were asked to believe " in," or " on," " the Lord 



CREED 119 

Jesus Christ." The Philippian jailer was thus told, 
along with the Ethiopian eunuch and the Roman 
centurion. Yery clearly, then, the creed of the 
early Church was the simplest possible profession 
of a belief in Jesus as the Christ, or the Anointed 
One of God. 

All this seems easy enough ; the difficult 
problem arises when we attempt to interpret 
the confession of Peter, or the pseudo-confes- 
sion of the eunuch. What is meant by those 
words " belief in Christ " ? What did the Apostles 
mean when they used them ? What concept did 
the early convert have in his mind when they were 
put to him and he breathed an affirmative reply ? 
Obviously, all the creeds of historic Christendom 
have started at this point. It seems perfectly clear, 
however, that a statement of faith which would be 
intelligible to a Jerusalem Jew, a jailer at Philippi, 
a Greek woman at Athens, and the lower order of 
servants at Rome, would not be very recondite or 
profound. To believe in Christ, or to acknowledge 
Jesus as the Christ, must therefore have been some- 
thing very clear in meaning, very simple, and yet 
very comprehensive and complete. Any special 
theory regarding the much mooted points of theo- 
logical dogma could hardly have found a place in 
such a concept. When one studies this early con- 



120 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

fession more and more, he is irresistibly driven to 
the conclusion that the first creed of Christendom 
was not a statement of dogma at all, but rather an 
affirmation in regard to the Christ ideal of life. In 
other words, the early convert, when asked to be- 
lieve that "Jesus is the Christ," was asked to 
accept Jesus as his Ultimate Ideal, as his Supreme 
Lord and King, as the One whom he pledged him- 
self to obey in all things pertaining to life and 
destiny. This of course was to accept His Divinity, 
and it is the only practical meaning which the Divin- 
ity of Christ can have for any one. The word Christ 
itself, in its interpretation as the Anointed One, 
conveys precisely this idea. To believe that Jesus 
is the Anointed One is to believe that He is Lord 
and King of one's life, and to say that we will 
strive to realize His life in our own. 

In the Gospels, such an interpretation of the words 
" belief in Christ " finds ample warrant and support. 
In His famous sermon on the Bread of Life, preached 
at Capernaum, Jesus, in the boldest and most 
daring imagery conceivable, asserted the necessity 
for realizing His ideal of life. To the crude ma- 
terialistic interpretation of His words, He retorted 
in vain His interpretative statement, "It is the 
spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing." 
Clearly, therefore, in this greatest of His discourses 



CREED 121 

after the Sermon on the Mount, He taught the 
necessity for an appropriation of His ideal of life 
by the soul, in order that it should develop and 
grow. " I am the Bread of Life " means " I am 
the Ideal which the soul must realize in order that 
it may live and live forever." The famous "I 
Am's " used by the Great Teacher upon many other 
occasions indicate the same idea. He is the Living 
Water, as He is the Bread of Life, because He 
furnishes the supreme ideal after which man must 
fashion his character and soul. Very obviously, 
then, an affirmation of acquiescence in His ideal 
of life ought to constitute the confession of faith 
demanded from His disciples. 

In the Epistles of Paul and the other Apostolic 
writers, we find a similar confirmation. Paul, 
although distinctively a theologian in temper, no- 
where obtrudes even his theology as an essential 
part of the Christian's creed. He is very pro- 
nounced in saying, however, that unless a so-called 
Christian possesses the Spirit of Christ, he is none 
of His. By way of defining this language, he 
gives his famous catalogue of the "fruits of the 
Spirit," which is really nothing more than a 
condensed outline of vital Christianity. A great 
part of Paul's instructions as contained in the 
Epistles bears directly upon practical living and 



122 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

behavior. Still more practical than Paul is James, 
perhaps the first, chronologically speaking, of all 
New Testament writers. Pure religion is defined 
by him, as it was by his Master when conversing 
with the rich young ruler, as the incarnation of 
service and righteousness ; and his entire Epistle 
shows the tremendous emphasis placed upon vital 
Christianity and the practical realization of Christ's 
ideals in the early Apostolic days. 

Much argument has centred around the Great 
Commission, especially as it is found in Matthew 
and Mark. A prominent agnostic as we have al- 
ready noted has commented upon the cruelty of 
the words, " He that believeth not shall be con- 
demned." Still others have attacked the idea of 
belief as a volitional process. To condemn a man 
for failing to believe that which his reason will not 
accept is assuredly the part of neither reason nor 
justice. But belief, as the Great Commission used 
the word, and as the early Christians understood 
it, did not refer to any philosophical or theological 
concept, upon which men might and necessarily 
would differ. Rather did it refer to the acceptance 
of a certain ideal as the guide of life, and this any 
one could do without in the slightest degree violat- 
ing his intellectual honesty. The Great Commis- 
sion does not say, for example, " He that believeth 



CREED 123 

in this or that theory of the atonement shall be 
saved," nor is there anything about it which would 
warrant such a statement. The words are simply, 
" He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." 

We have already referred to the significance of 
the creed herein advocated, as applied to the per- 
manence of Christianity. Such a creed can never 
be outgrown, never need any revision, never fail to 
interpret properly the religion of which it is a part. 
As long as men are willing to acknowledge their 
adherence to the Christ ideal of life, so long will 
there be Christians in the world; and whenever 
men fail to do this, Christianity will disappear. 

The first confession of the Church, the great 
confession of Peter, must be, therefore, her last 
confession. Upon this rock she was first builded, 
and upon this rock her eternal permanence must 
rest. When men say with the Fisherman of Gali- 
lee, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living 
God," they have accepted the ultimate and uni- 
versal creed ; and beyond this it is useless to go. 
Upon this great historic creed, not as a statement 
of dogma, not as a pronouncement of philosophy, 
not as a tenet of theology, but as a practical ex- 
pression of a desire to live the Christ life, the 
mighty hosts of Christendom will some time be 
one. Here and here alone, we find common 



124 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

ground. That Christianity which does not recog- 
nize the Christ Character as its goal is a mistaken 
interpretation of the Master's teaching and life. 
That Christianity, on the other hand, which does 
so interpret His message, can unite upon His own 
universal creed. Each man will retain, as hereto- 
fore, his private interpretation in regard to matters 
of theology, but all will unite upon the one vital 
creed, a creed broad enough to include all Chris- 
tians, and yet narrow enough and strong enough 
to embrace every necessary element of the religion 
of Christ. 



II 

OEDINANCE 

AS the question of creed deals with that 
which one must believe in order to belong 
to the Church, so the question of ordi- 
nance has for its province that which one must do 
or perform. There can be no efficient organization 
without at least some simple form or forms to 
serve as its skeleton. No secret order, for example, 
exists without its initiatory rites ; and the plain- 
est sort of psychology demands always that there 
should be some means by which to express one's 
belief in action. The religion of Christ, as em- 
bodied in the Church, has found the simplest pos- 
sible way in which to express its fundamental 
tenets. Two ordinances, the one as initiatory, the 
other as perpetual, constitute its entire framework. 
We call these ordinances Baptism, and the Lord's 
Supper or the Eucharist. Ample Scriptural war- 
rant may easily be found for both of these sacra- 
ments ; none of significance for any other. Some 
Christian bodies, indeed, assert the existence of 
other ordinances ; but in almost every case they 
125 



126 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

base the ground for this assertion, not upon the 
New Testament procedure, but upon the grant of 
superior powers presumably given the Church. 

The establishment of the ordinance of baptism as 
the initiatory rite demanded by Jesus Christ of 
those who desire to become His disciples, is per- 
fectly clear. The Great Commission, in both 
Matthew and Mark, commands baptism as an es- 
sential symbol of conversion for the followers of 
the Man of Galilee. In the opening discourse of 
Peter upon the day of Pentecost, the converts to 
his preaching were commanded — " Repent and be 
baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus 
Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive 
the gift of the Holy Ghost." Following this 
pronouncement, it is stated, " They that gladly re- 
ceived his word were baptized." The Ethiopian 
eunuch, desiring to become a follower of Christ, 
was forthwith baptized. The Philippian jailer, 
professing a similar faith, was baptized the same 
hour of the night. Even Saul of Tarsus, though 
chosen in a special way, for a special mission, none 
the less was likewise commanded to be baptized, be- 
fore his permanent enrollment among the followers 
of Christ. It may suffice, in this connection, to 
say that there is no record in the New Testament 
of admission to the Church without baptism, and 



OEDINANCE 127 

that in every specific case where details of conver- 
sion are given, the ordinance is directly mentioned. 
Even the Supreme Teacher Himself was baptized, 
although over the protest of the baptizer. If there 
is anything, therefore, quite explicitly taught in the 
New Testament, it is the existence of baptism as 
the initiatory ordinance of the Christian religion. 

Three more or less vexing problems follow, how- 
ever, upon this admission. These three problems re- 
late to the design, the subjects and the action of 
the ordinance. In other words, why are people 
baptized ? what people are fit subjects for Christian 
baptism ? and how are such subjects baptized ? 

The answer to the first of these questions has been 
in large measure already given. Without some 
initiatory rite, no framework for the Church could 
be found, and only upon obedience to this rite 
could the convert be said to dedicate himself com- 
pletely to the new ideal of life. Both the volitional 
assent implied in the creed, and likewise the prac- 
tical assent implied in the ordinance of baptism, 
were needed in order to complete the conversion, as 
the New Testament writers understood the term. 
Anything short of this would mean an incomplete 
dedication and therefore an unsatisfactory one. 
For this reason, baptism is coupled with the " re- 
mission of sins " in the language of Peter on the 



128 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

day of Pentecost, as well as in the speech of Paul 
before the citizens of Jerusalem, as recorded in the 
twenty-second chapter of Acts. Formally speak- 
ing, complete obedience to the commands of Christ 
was needed before the convert had fully put on the 
Christian faith. Of course the absurd question 
sometimes propounded, " Can a man be saved with- 
out baptism ? " or the similar one, " Is baptism es- 
sential to the forgiveness of sins ? " and the like, 
needs no comment here. The right-minded man 
will always want to do what it is clearly his duty 
to do, regardless of consequences. That the scheme 
of the New Testament Church demands baptism for 
admission should be clear to all. That baptism, or 
any rite of formal Christianity, is the whole of the 
religion of Christ, only those who have mistaken 
the end for the means will assert. It is clearly, 
therefore, the duty of the man who would become a 
Christian to be baptized ; whatever significance 
may attach to the ordinance is not for him to ques- 
tion. That is an altogether wrong frame of mind 
which asks, " How far may I neglect my duty and 
still be saved ? " The right-minded man does not 
want to neglect his duty, whether it be important 
or unimportant, if he be once clearly shown that, 
however insignificant it may appear, it is still his 
duty, and therefore on no account to be despised. 



OKDINANCE 129 

The answer to the second question is likewise 
largely involved in the first. If baptism is the 
initiatory rite admitting the penitent believer into 
the Church, if it is the final step in the process of 
conversion, if it is the expression in action of the 
volitional acceptance of the creed, if it is, in other 
words, the seal of an honest determination to fol- 
low Christ and His ideal of life, then very obviously 
its subjects are already designated. Only those 
who can make such a determination are eligible. 
That idea which puts baptism first instead of last 
in the process assuredly has no warrant in either 
psychology or Scripture. This is written in all 
kindness, and with the fullest possible appreciation 
of the value of a dedicatory service for the children 
of Christian parents. That a child, so far as pos- 
sible, should be brought up in the Church and 
dedicated to her service is very apparent ; but that 
such a dedication should be styled Christian bap- 
tism is by no means thus apparent. Christian bap- 
tism, as indicated in the New Testament, is the final 
initiatory act of obedience which admits one to full 
fellowship with Christ. So far at least as the 
testimony of the record shows, it should always 
follow and never precede that complete surrender 
to the Christ ideal of life which is the vital element 
in all true conversion. 



130 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

The answer to the third question is also largely 
involved in what has been already written. How 
people were baptized when the ordinance was first 
established would seem to be reasonably plain from 
the testimony of the New Testament. It is not 
necessary to appeal to linguistic or technical argu- 
ment to establish the character of the ordinance. 
Any one who will take the trouble to underscore 
the word as it occurs in the New Testament, in our 
English versions, and read the context carefully in 
each case, will discover that only one action will 
fully satisfy all the requirements of the text. To 
" go down into the water," to " come up from it," 
to " be buried," " washing of regeneration," and 
the like expressions, are clearly interpreted in one 
way and one alone. Added to this testimony of 
the text is the original significance of the word, 
and the now overwhelming weight of scholarship 
in regard to the matter. Yery absurd here again 
is the question sometimes propounded, " Can a man 
be saved who has not been immersed ? " What 
folly to talk of consequences, if immersion is really 
the act of Christian baptism ! The external action 
may or may not be of special significance, but be- 
ing a part of the ordinance, the right-minded man 
should always desire that every part measure up, 
as nearly as possible, to the correct standard. That 



ORDINANCE 131 

the action of baptism, which is a part of one of the 
ordinances of formal Christianity, is the whole of 
the religion of Christ, is quite as absurd as the idea 
that because it occupies such a position it should 
not be performed correctly. An ideal standard in 
religion demands accuracy, not only as regards the 
greatest, but also as regards every question upon 
which it is possible for us to secure accurate infor- 
mation at all. 

The significant opposition to the views of the 
first Christian ordinance herein expressed is 
grounded in one theory, the theory so ably main- 
tained by the oldest and largest of all the divisions 
of Christendom. This theory may be expressed 
in a word. That the original constitution of the 
Church provided for immersion as Christian bap- 
tism, we readily concede. To the Church, however, 
was given the power to change her own constitution 
in such a way or ways as should best suit her pur- 
poses and convenience. This principle, the idea 
that the Church herself has power to change her 
fundamental constitution from age to age, is back 
of all the significant opposition to the doctrines and 
practice of the New Testament organization. That 
power which is taken away from the constitution 
is thus given to the ecclesiastical organization. 

That the Church has power to adapt herself in all 



132 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

non-essential particulars to the needs of the age, is 
indeed plain ; but it is no plainer than the fact that 
in essential particulars she does not possess any- 
such power. Baptism is the initiatory rite of the 
Church ; it is a feature of its fundamental constitu- 
tion. Now unless specific provision is made within 
the constitution itself for change, it is an unwar- 
ranted assumption to presuppose such a power. 
But one searches the Scriptures in vain to discover 
evidence of such amendatory provision. There is 
not the slightest hint contained in the New Testa- 
ment that any number of Christians constituting 
the visible body of the Church at any future time 
should possess the right to change her fundamental 
constitution. When Christ said in the terms of the 
Great Commission, " Go ye into all the world and 
preach the Gospel to every creature ; he that be- 
lieveth and is baptized shall be saved and he that 
believeth not shall be condemned," there is no hint 
or suggestion that the baptism spoken of should 
mean one thing in one age and another thing in 
another. Only those who believe in the establish- 
ment of a great ecclesiastical hierarchy with such 
absolute powers as to make it supreme over all 
constitution and law, can justify a conclusion of the 
character suggested. Such a hierarchy, however, 
violates not only the provisions for formal Christi- 



ORDINANCE 133 

anity as found in the New Testament, but also de- 
stroys at least one of the essentials of vital Christi- 
anity, the noble ideal of freedom. Those who 
believe in an ecclesiasticism of this sort may, how- 
ever, logically justify a departure from the New 
Testament standards, but we cannot see how it is 
possible for others to do so. 

The second ordinance of the Church, the ordinance 
for permanent and perpetual observance, is usually 
styled the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist. Common 
consent has likewise established this rite as an 
essential feature of the Christian worship. Insti- 
tuted by Christ, symbolic of His sufferings and 
death, practiced by the Church in unbroken suc- 
cession since the Apostolic days, its claim to a 
fundamental position in any formal analysis of 
Christianity is undisputed and indisputable. Its 
significance doubtless arises from the fact that by 
its simple symbolism that Ideal Life, the closing 
scenes of which it commemorates, is brought the 
more vividly before the minds of the professed 
followers of Christ. It has therefore a very impor- 
tant function in serving as a bearer of vital 
Christianity. It preaches in undying and eloquent 
tones the supreme act of service of that Life which 
was devoted throughout to the service of all. It 



134 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

strengthens the resolution taken in the initiatory 
ordinance of baptism, and helps to keep it alive. 
The early Christians were fully aware of its 
significance, and regarded it as an essential part of 
their ordinary worship. That they observed it reg- 
ularly on the first day of every week is the 
obvious inference of the text, 1 though no specific 
command to that effect is recorded. 

Theological interpretations of either of the two 
fundamental ordinances of Christianity form no 
essential part of the religion of Christ. Funda- 
mentally externa] actions expressive of an inner 
purpose or decision of will, they constitute the 
simple framework which serves as the bearer of 
the Christ ideal of life. Men may interpret them 
in whatever mystical or philosophical way they 
please, so long as they do not seek to bind their 
own interpretations upon the consciences of others. 
The most cruel and unfortunate chapter in the 
history of the Church was written by the efforts of 
some men to bind upon others their own theories of 
the Eucharist. Such attempts of course came from 
a misinterpretation of both vital and formal Chris- 
tianity. The latter never demanded coercion of the 
kind ; and the former, through the ideal of freedom, 

1 See Acts xx. 7 — " And upon the first day of the week, when 
the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto 
them." 



ORDINANCE 135 

utterly contradicted it. In all our temptations to 
theological acerbity over the ordinances, it is well 
to remember that the spirit they breathe is ever the 
spirit of love and service, and that unless that spirit 
is present in our discussions, we have observed these 
rites in vain. Well did the old Psalmist say, not 
indeed in this, but in a similar connection : 

" For thou desirest not sacrifice ; else would 

I give it : 
Thou delightest not in burnt offering. 
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit : 
A broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou 

wilt not despise." 

Well, too, has Frederick W. Faber expressed the 
spirit of all the ordinances in his beautiful words : 

" There's a wideness in God's mercy, 

Like the wideness of the sea : 

There's a kindness in His justice, 

Which is more than liberty. 

For the love of God is broader 

Than the measure of man's mind ; 
And the heart of the Eternal 

Is most wonderfully kind. 
If our love were but more simple, 

We should take Him at His word ; 
And our lives would be all sunshine 

In the sweetness of our Lord." 



Ill 

POLITY 

PEEHAPS the most difficult problem of 
formal Christianity is the question of pol- 
ity, or church government. The creed of 
the Apostolic Church does not seem hard to de- 
termine, and although there has been more or less 
discussion upon the question of ordinance, it is upon 
the subject of polity that the most serious lines of 
cleavage among the followers of Christ are to be 
found. 

Three forms of government, the Episcopalian, 
the Presbyterian and the Congregational, are in 
existence among Protestant bodies. It seems very 
probable that these different forms originated 
largely from the prevailing types in vogue among 
the different nations when the Church began its 
work. Imperial Rome furnished the germ of the 
episcopacy ; the Judean Synagogue, the starting- 
point of the presbytery ; and the free Greek com- 
munities of Asia Minor and elsewhere, the basis of 
Congregationalism. Nothing is clearer than the 
fact that no special polity is set forth in a manda- 
tory way in the New Testament. It is certain that 
136 



POLITY 137 

specific officers known as elders and deacons formed 
a part of the early church organization. Paul or- 
dained elders in all of the churches, and the estab- 
lishment of the diaconate is set forth in detail in 
the Acts of the Apostles. The duties pertaining to 
these offices are also clearly outlined in the Pastoral 
Epistles of the Apostle of Tarsus. There is no 
reference in the New Testament to any organized 
Church with a central head, though there are a 
number of references to the Churches of Christ col- 
lectively. The Church at Jerusalem seems to have 
had some special weight in the early counsels of 
Christendom, a fact doubtless due to the presence 
of so many of the Apostles ; but there is nothing 
said of any central ecclesiasticism, either there or at 
Eome. 

The polity of the Apostolic Church in the New 
Testament days, so far as it can be determined, 
was therefore unquestionably Congregational. That 
there was any specific injunction laid upon the 
Church of future ages to continue this polity, may 
be questioned. That the creed and the ordinances, 
as fixed and fundamental factors in the constitu- 
tion of Christianity, cannot be changed, except by 
the great Head of the Church Himself, seems clear ; 
but the same is not equally true of any distinctive 
polity. That form of government which will best 



138 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

subserve the spiritual interests of the whole Church 
would seem to be the form required by Scriptural 
authority. This being conceded, it still remains 
questionable whether any form more satisfactory 
than that actually in existence in the Apostolic days 
has been devised since. Any government which 
does violence to the third great ideal of Christ is 
sure, in the end, to cost more than it is worth. 

The idea of Apostolic succession, held by a large 
and eminently respectable portion of Christendom, 
relies to no small degree upon tradition for its basis, 
and as a dogma wili probably never command any- 
thing like universal acceptance. The Episcopacy as a 
form of government may perhaps meet with better 
success, though it will in all likelihood have to un- 
dergo essential modifications if it does so. The 
Presbyterian polity has also many points in its 
favor, but it seems hardly probable that it will 
ever appeal to the hosts of universal Christendom. 

There is a demand for freedom in the modern age 
which cannot be suppressed. The Congregational 
polity gratifies this demand, but is weak along the 
line of effective organization and direction. A 
polity which would guarantee the freedom of the 
last of the trinity and the effectiveness of the first, 
would appear to be the ideal. This seems to be 
reached largely through the cooperation of inde- 



POLITY 139 

pendent churches bound together not by authority, 
but by reason and love. The extreme independence 
of a radical Congregationalism is almost if not alto- 
gether as defective as the excessive centralism of a 
despotic hierarchy. Not all the problems of church 
polity are yet worked out, but it is safe to say that 
the religion of Christ demands that measure of free- 
dom which was guaranteed each individual church 
in the Apostolic days, and beyond this, all the effi- 
ciency in the way of organization that it is possible 
to secure. 

Whatever organization may be effected must 
assuredly be founded upon the New Testament 
basis. Whatever cooperation may be secured must 
come from the free Churches of Christ as indi- 
vidual units, and dare not be imposed upon them. 
Perfect autonomy and freedom must be guaran- 
teed to the individual Christian and the individual 
church. This was the victory won in the Eeforma- 
tion, and its fruits must not be thrown away. 
Starting from the New Testament idea of free but 
cooperating units, there will result that final organ- 
ization of the Church which will guarantee perfect 
liberty to each and absolute efficiency to all. We 
are perhaps not ready for this yet, taking the Chris- 
tian world as a whole ; but we are rapidly getting 
ready. In the meantime, individual churches of all 



140 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

communions should cultivate the cooperative spirit, 
and endeavor to help each other in the common 
warfare against evil. Whenever the Church of 
Christ becomes one, in answer to the Master's 
prayer, it will be through the cooperation of indi- 
vidual churches from the bottom, and never by 
legislative enactment from the top. This coopera- 
tion all Christians should encourage, and the good 
feeling thus engendered will prove no small element 
in solving other problems of divergence. With a 
better understanding of each other, with the spirit 
of prejudice disappearing before the spirit of prayer, 
and with an honest effort on the part of each one 
to do his duty in the contest against the common 
foe, the goal of Christendom in the matter of or- 
ganization will be reached ere we are aware. The 
motto of all Christians in regard to polity, as in 
other matters, must ever be, " In essentials unity, 
in non-essentials freedom, in all things charity." 
To borrow the expressive sentence of Daniel Web- 
ster in his " Reply to Hayne," the watchword of the 
Church, no less than the watchword of the state, in 
matters of government, must be : 

" Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and in- 
separable." 



IV 

THE SPIRITUAL AND MYSTICAL ELE- 
MENT IN RELIGION 

CREED, ordinance and polity constitute the 
skeleton or framework of the Church, but 
they do not constitute all that is meant by 
the religious life. Nor does the practice of vital 
Christianity, in addition to them, include all that 
there is in religion. To be a Christian, to be a 
member of Christ's Church, means something more, 
and that something more is embraced in the emo- 
tional and spiritual content of formal Christianity 
usually included under the idea of worship. Wor- 
ship is largely an emotional term, and embodies all 
of that mystical and aesthetic element which has 
proven so appealing to many minds in all times and 
all ages. Worship includes the idea of prayer, 
with its wonderful voice for the aching heart of 
humanity ; it includes likewise the aesthetic appeal 
of great architecture and painting and music ; it 
has to do with what we style ritual, and all those 
forms and ceremonies which, however complex or 
simple they may be, touch the heart and move the 
141 



142 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

soul. Even so stern a Puritan as Milton could not 
help being affected by the " studious cloister's 
pale," and 

" the high embowed roof, 
With antique pillars massy-proof, 
And storied windows richly dight, 
Castiug a dim religious light," 

while the voice of music spoke even more appeal- 
ingly than that of architecture to his soul : 

" There let the pealing organ blow 
To the full-voiced quire below, 
Iu service high, and anthems clear, 
As may with sweetness, through mine ear, 
Dissolve me into ecstasies, 
And bring all heaven before mine eyes." 

Without attempting any exhaustive analysis of 
this tremendously rich side of the religious concept, 
we shall endeavor to embody the most important 
features under a threefold division : first, the 
mystical or spiritual side of the Christian religion, 
embraced in an especial manner under the various 
interpretations and doctrines of the Holy Spirit ; 
second, the function of prayer ; and third, the 
element of ritual and the aesthetic in general as 
applied to Christianity. 

The first involves a great part of religion 



SPIRITUAL ELEMENTS 143 

to many Christians ; and although there are num- 
berless theories of the Holy Spirit, some place 
is given to Him in all systems of Christianity. 
No Christian church is without a belief of some 
sort in the Holy Spirit. The more mystical 
the individual Christian may be, the greater 
part will this belief play in his life ; while the 
more rationalistic and unemotional he is, the less 
significance will he attach to it. To dogmatize in 
a matter which is of such obviously individual 
interpretation would be absurd. Theories of the 
Holy Spirit, like theories dealing with other mat- 
ters of dogma and theology, are not to be enforced 
by one Christian upon another. The mystic and 
the rationalist may both be Christians upon the 
common foundation of the confession of Peter, 
though the one " sees visions and dreams dreams," 
while the other sees no visions at all. The religion 
of Christ is broad enough to include them all, so 
long as the mystic keeps reason enough to transact 
the ordinary business of life, and so long as the 
rationalist keeps mysticism enough to believe in a 
spiritual reality beyond the things of material 
sense. To say that only the mystic is a Christian 
is absurd ; to say that he is not a Christian is 
equally so. 

The spiritual significance of Christianity is a 



144 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

theme which should receive the earnest attention 
of every Christian. That the " miracles of con- 
version " which the modern age presents, the 
reclamation of men like Gough and McAuley and 
Hadley, the lifting up of whole nations such as the 
Feejee and Sandwich Islanders, and other examples 
of similar character — that these things are not 
evidences of a power beyond the purely material, 
surely, we think, admits of no discussion. How- 
ever rationalistic in temper a man may be, in the 
presence of the facts to which allusion has just 
been made, to say nothing of the inexplicable 
mysteries opened up by the whole subject of genius 
and inspiration, he must, if he be thoughtful at all, 
agree with the sentiment of Hamlet : 

" There are more things in Heaven and Earth, 
Horatio, 
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." 

The function of prayer as an essential feature of 
Christianity will hardly be disputed. Here again 
there is wide room for divergence, and yet cer- 
tainly all men, and especially all Christians, w r ill 
pray at some time or other. Prayer keys the soul 
to the Unseen and the Infinite, and lifts one out of 
his little individual sphere into the larger com- 
munion with the universe and with God. No 



SPIRITUAL ELEMENTS 145 

Christian can be a Christian without prayer, and 
certainly no Christian would want to be one with- 
out it. That sympathy with the spiritual and the 
ideal which was at the heart of all the philosophy 
of the Nazarene can be fostered and developed 
only through prayer. Nothing is more indisput- 
able or significant in the life of Jesus than His 
habit of constant petition to His Father. Some- 
times He remained alone all night in solitary sup- 
plication. In communion with Nature, upon the 
mountain, by the seashore, or among the hills, 
He sought strength for the daily task which was 
His. Prayer has been the source of inspiration 
and power for the good and great of all times and 
all ages. Good men practically without exception 
are and have been men of prayer. It is unneces- 
sary that the question of the objective or the sub- 
jective value of our petitions should be discussed 
here. Whether the universe comes to us or we 
come to the universe is, after all, of little signifi- 
cance, providing there is harmony between us. 
Robertson's masterly appeal for the subjective 
value of prayer has a place along with George 
Miiller's orphanage and the other objective wit* 
nesses. The great significance of prayer as a part 
of the Christian religion is its power to bring one 
into vital touch with the spiritual and the ideal side 



146 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

of life, and to save us from the dominance of the 
sordid and the material. However moral a man's 
life may be objectively, it will always lack richness 
and fervor unless he is also a man of prayer. 

The value of the purely artistic or aesthetic 
features of worship is also one which has provoked 
wide-spread discussion. Many Christians see in 
great architecture, painting and music, an effective 
means for deepening the spiritual life. Others on 
various grounds object to them entirely. That the 
moral content of Christianity is more important 
than its aesthetic features must, we think, be con- 
ceded ; and yet the aesthetic element is a large and 
significant factor, not only in the religious, but also 
in the total life of man. Great music has un- 
doubtedly a stimulative value, which, properly 
used, means much in the religious life. So long as 
the art element remains the hand-maiden of relig- 
ion and morals, her services are valuable and indeed 
almost indispensable. Whenever she usurps the 
throne for herself, however, she proves destructive 
to both. No architecture can be too superb for 
the material dwelling place of the Church, so long 
as the Church dwarfs the edifice and not the edifice 
the Church. No music can be too inspiring so long 
as it points to the Cross, and makes men and 
women forget its own beauty by revealing the 



SPIRITUAL ELEMENTS 14? 

beauty of Christ. No ritual can be too impressive 
so long as it holds up Christ and the Christian life 
before men, and does not degenerate into the 
mockery of religious pretense and sham. Here 
again, much latitude mast be permitted to the 
individual Christian and the individual Church. 
To some temperaments, the purely aesthetic element 
will always appeal ; to others, it will not. That 
there is a place for it in the religion of Christ, no 
thinking man can deny ; what place is given it 
will depend upon the extent to which the artistic 
side of life makes its appeal to individual Chris- 
tians. 

It is obvious that we have but touched upon this 
rich and important side of formal Christianity. 
Many other factors enter into worship, which we 
have not attempted to discuss. The Word of God, 
as the basis not only of this feature but indeed of 
both vital and formal Christianity as a whole, is an 
important example ; the personality and office of 
the preacher is another. The outline given will 
suffice, however, to indicate the nature of the 
subject, as well as its breadth and value. What- 
ever a man's temperament may be, he finds in 
a true religious service that inspiration which 
Wordsworth depicts in one of his choicest pas- 



148 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

" that blessed mood, 
In which the burthen of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world, 
Is lightened :— that serene and blessed mood, 
In which the affections gently lead us on 
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
And even the motion of our human blood 
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
In body, and become a living soul : 
While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
We see into the life of things." 



CONVEESION 

IT would seem that after a study of the content 
of religion, or vital Christianity, and an at- 
tempt at least towards an interpretation of the 
nature and function of the Church, nothing would 
need to be said regarding the acceptance of Christ 
by the individual. Obviously the man who turns 
to the Christ ideal of life, who believes in Jesus as 
Lord and King, and who desires to enter upon His 
service, should have no difficulty in discovering 
how to carry out his desire. In the early history 
of the Church, as recorded in the Acts of the 
Apostles, it is certain that men found little difficulty 
in becoming members of the Church of Christ. 
Three thousand were added on the day of Pentecost 
alone, and large numbers upon other occasions. 

The process by which these early converts became 
identified with the Church seems to have been ex- 
ceedingly simple. That process may be expressed 
in three words frequently found in the early record. 
Those three words were belief, repentance and 
baptism. The first word related to an intellectual 
acceptance of Christ as Lord, and the life which 
149 



150 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

He advocated as the true life for man to live ; the 
second stood for a resolute turning from the old life 
to walk in the new ; and the third represented the 
initiatory rite which marked the complete obedience 
of the convert to his new Master and Lord. There 
is no case of conversion recorded in the history of 
the Church as given in the New Testament which 
does not include these three things. Upon the day 
of Pentecost, as Peter for the first time proclaimed 
the charter of the new Church, when those who 
heard his burning words and believed them to be true 
turned to him and said, " What shall we do ? " the 
answer came with unerring precision, " Repent and 
be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus 
Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive 
the gift of the Holy Ghost ; " and the text states, 
" They that gladly received his word were baptized ; 
and the same day there were added unto them 
about three thousand souls." 

It would be difficult to place too much em- 
phasis upon this account of the first additions 
to the Church of Christ, as recorded in the 
second chapter of Acts. Everything conspired to 
make the case a typical one, for the benefit 
of all who should come after. It was the day 
of the formal founding of the Church as an 
organization, that day being signalized by the 



CONVERSION 151 

miraculous descent of the Holy Spirit. Peter, as 
the chief spokesman, was in a position to state 
authoritatively all necessary facts connected with 
admission to the new organization. It was as- 
suredly the occasion of all occasions when the 
method of conversion should have been made per- 
fectly clear and plain. So far as the record at least 
is concerned, it could not indeed have been made 
plainer. The three thousand yielded their assent 
to the new doctrine, an assent predicated in the 
question, " Men and brethren, what shall we do ? " 
They were told to " repent and be baptized," and 
when they obeyed this injunction, it is recorded 
that they were added to the nucleus of the early 
Church. 

This analysis of the first case of conversion 
to Christianity is borne out by every other case 
of which mention is made in the book of Acts. 
The Ethiopian eunuch hears the gospel story from 
Philip, believes it, confesses his faith, and is forth- 
with baptized to " go on his way rejoicing." The 
Philippian jailer believes the new Gospel, falls on 
his knees before Paul and Silas, and is baptized 
" the same hour of the night." Lydia, a seller of 
purple of Thyatira, hearing the message of Paul, 
opens her heart to it, and is baptized forthwith. 
Saul of Tarsus himself, notwithstanding his super- 



152 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

natural vision, is no exception to the general rule, 
for after his confession of faith in Christ on the 
Damascus highway, he too repents in blindness and 
solitude, and is baptized just as the other converts. 
Cornelius, the devout Roman centurion, is admitted 
to the Church in precisely the same way ; and when 
Philip preached to the inhabitants of Samaria, as 
recorded in the eighth chapter of Acts, it is stated 
that after they believed his preaching they were 
baptized, " both men and women." 

It is no part of our plan in what is stated here to 
attack in any way the belief of those who see a 
mystical element in conversion, nor have we any 
impeachment for men and women who espouse 
the essential facts of vital Christianity through any 
roundabout process whatever. What we are trying 
to make clear is the fact that admission to the 
Church, following an honest acceptance of the 
Christ ideal of life, was a very simple and direct 
thing in the Apostolic days. Why it should not be 
just as simple now, does not seem apparent. Why, 
when a man believes in Christ and His gospel of 
life, and honestly desires to serve Him and human- 
ity through Him, he should not be baptized and 
allowed to enter the Church, does not, we say, 
seem apparent. Obviously such a man would have 
become a member of the early Christian community 



CONVERSION 153 

in the shortest possible time, and in the simplest 
possible way. The eunuch was- a man like this, 
and his conversion is typical in every respect. 

To sum up, then, the entire subject in the fewest 
possible words : the early Christians demanded of 
every convert an acceptance of Jesus as the Christ 
— that is, as the Anointed One of God, this belief 
carrying with it an acceptance, of course, of the 
Christ ideal of life. They demanded along with 
this profession what was its necessary concomitant, 
an honest " turning away " from the old life of sin 
and evil deeds ; and last of all, as an evidence of 
overt obedience to the laws of the new kingdom, 
they required the convert to be baptized. When 
these things had been done, the new Christian came 
into the visible Church, and strove with his 
brethren, from day to day, to " walk in newness of 
life." 

A man converted in the way just described may 
not fulfill all of the special requirements of every 
Christian communion to-day, but there are few 
communions claiming to be the guardians of vital 
Christianity which will not acknowledge such a 
convert as being, in the fullest formal sense of the 
term, a Christian. 



VI 
THE CHUECH UNIVERSAL 

THE religion of Christ has had a strange 
and checkered history. At one time 
uniting both formal and vital elements in 
their native purity, it swept the world in a little 
over two centuries of triumphant progress. Then 
came the story of the decadence of the vital and 
the crystallization of the formal element in the 
darker days of the Middle Ages. Worst of all, in the 
minds of many, the formal became a substitute for 
the vital, and people came to believe that the touch 
of holy water on the body could cleanse the soul still 
reeking with sin. It is only proper, however, to 
say that all the while, much vital Christianity re- 
mained in the world. The annals of all time may 
be challenged to produce a more beautiful life than 
that of Francis of Assisi, or a more devout career 
than that of Thomas a Kempis ; while in the life of 
Savonarola, one catches a glimpse of a reincarnated 
Isaiah or Elijah. Those who imagine that the 
Middle Ages were devoid of splendid examples of 
genuine Christianity are by no means familiar with 
154 



THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 155 

the facts. The unfortunate thing about mediaeval 
Christendom was the dominance, at times, of the 
visible Church, at least at its centre, by false ideals 
and a mistaken concept of life. 

Then came the days of the Reformation, with its 
stirring appeal for the revival of the moral .life as 
constituting the heart of Christianity. This was the 
burden of Luther's appeal ; it was also back of the 
stentorian blasts of Knox, and the gentle words of 
Zwingli and Melancthon. Too often the reformers 
were motived by some of the baser passions in their 
work, too often they persecuted their persecutors, 
and in other ways showed that they were by no 
means perfect followers of their Master ; and yet, 
even at the worst, their efforts advanced in no 
slight measure the concept of a world-wide Chris- 
tendom, embodying more fully than ever before the 
supreme ideals of Christ. In this world movement, 
it should be remembered too that Francis Xavier 
and Loyola had a part, as well as Calvin and Luther. 

It was necessary that the Church should realize the 
fundamental significance of the ideals of its Master, 
and that vital Christianity should regain its old 
place in the hearts of men. The ideal which 
needed most attention was the ideal of freedom, 
and the world is to-day only beginning to realize 
the immense significance of this principle. The 



156 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

proper place to be given vital Christianity is pretty 
universally understood and acknowledged at the 
present time, throughout the Christian world. The 
Christ life is everywhere conceded to be the end of 
religion, and it is to the credit of all sections of 
Christendom that no one party or denomination 
has a monopoly upon good men or good women. 

Formal Christianity still divides the visible Church 
into more or less antagonistic sections ; but these sec- 
tions are coming closer together, and in the Master's 
own good time, will all be fused into one. It was 
essential that the Church should have its crude unity 
broken up in order that men should realize to the 
fullest the supreme blessings of the ideal of freedom. 
Now that freedom has been gained, and all Chris- 
tians everywhere think freely upon religion and are 
allowed to do so, with comparatively trifling excep- 
tions ; the world is ready for the larger unity which 
will not be gained at the cost of freedom, but which 
will include it as an essential element. The Church 
Universal will be that embodiment of formal 
religion which, ever including vital Christianity 
as its content and goal, will guarantee per- 
fect freedom to every individual Christian, and at 
the same time unified action to all. It will be such 
a unity as will guarantee the fullest liberty to the 
conscience of every believer, and yet eliminate all 



THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 157 

jealousy, bickering and strife between Christians of 
divergent opinions. Christendom as a whole is 
veering rapidly towards this point, but as yet is not 
quite up to the goal. 

One essential still to be realized is a single name 
for all the hosts of Christ. Divergent names create 
party spirit, and party spirit engenders strife. Dif- 
ferent organizations, rival church boards, rival pub- 
lishing houses and the like, work to the same end. 
Some day there will be a single name, with, perhaps, 
for a while, the smaller names in parenthesis, as is the 
case on many mission fields, a single representative 
board, perchance to look after all of the little boards, 
and such a unification of machinery as will guarantee 
harmonious action and effort. This unity will come 
not from the top but from the bottom. It will not 
be imposed upon Christians by ecclesiastical authori- 
ties, but Christians anxious and eager to realize the 
prayer of their Master will compel their ecclesias- 
ticisms to accept it. This unity will be real, vital 
and spontaneous. It is essential to the conquest of 
the world by the armies of Christ, and it will come. 
My opposition or your opposition may retard but 
will not prevent it. As Christians have won 
freedom, so they will win unity. And that unity 
will be the unity not of a great ecclesiasticism, but 
of a living Church ; not of unwillingness or force or 



158 FORMAL CHRISTIANITY 

tyranny, but of freedom, of joy and of love. The 
Church of Christ, Universal, must come ; and it will 
come. We have it in our power to hasten its com* 
ing or to throw stumbling-blocks in its progress. 
Fichte, in his " Doctrine of Religion," a hundred 
years ago, wrote these eloquent words : 

". . . Hadst thou done the like deed in holy 
indignation that the Son of Eternity should be tor- 
mented by such vanities as these, and should be 
left there so forsaken by his fellow men : — with the 
desire that he might have at least one glad hour in 
which he might raise his eyes joyfully and thank- 
fully to heaven, with the purpose that in thy hand 
he might see the saving hand of God and might 
know of a surety that the arm of God is not yet 
shortened, but that he has everywhere instruments 
and servants to do His will . . . then had thy 
deed been the outward expression of a moral 
religious spirit." 

Fichte's vision of the Son of Eternity ought to 
be our vision of the Son of Man. He has left in 
our hands the matter of accomplishing or failing to 
accomplish His will. It is for us to bring sorrow 
to His great heart of love, or joy to His soul, the 
true soul of the world. Perhaps we, consciously or 
unconsciously, are retarding the fulfillment of His 
great desire, the union of His followers. Surely to 



THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL 159 

do so is to crucify Him anew, and to put Him to an 
open shame before the world. May all who profess 
the religion of Christ meditate again and again 
upon His words : 

" Neither pray I for these alone, but for them 
also which shall believe on Me through their word : 
that they all may be one ; as Thou, Father, art in 
Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us ; 
that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me." 



Appendix 

General Note. 

The material contained in this appendix in- 
cludes data which has been used in classroom 
lectures, outlines, source material, and other in- 
formation of interest to the student rather than 
to the general reader. 

The Scripture references have been selected 
with especial care, and represent the author's 
authority for his conclusions in regard to the 
ethics of Jesus as well as for other positions 
taken in the body of the volume. It is scarcely 
necessary to add that the author does not pre- 
sume to endorse, in their entirety, many of the 
reference-books appended as suggestive reading 
in connection with the outlines which follow. 

Critical questions are not touched upon be- 
cause it is the conviction of the writer that the 
personality of Jesus, and the essential facts of 
his religion, are not seriously affected one way 
or the other by the results of modern criticism. 
The religion of Christ is a living thing to-day — 
a thing the existence of which can no more be 
disputed than it is possible to dispute the actu- 
ality of the sun, the moon or the stars. It is 
redefinition and scrutiny of this undisputed fact 
which constitutes the basis of our study. 

161 



162 APPENDIX 

PART I. 

Study Outlines Covering Chapters L, II. 
and III. 

I. The Development of the Religious Consciousness 
in the World. 

1. The law of development in the universe as regards 

both Individual and Race. 

(1) The individual. Examples from infancy, childhood, 
adolescence. 

(2) The race, (a) The family; (b) the tribe or clan; 
(c) transition to the state; (d) external powur 
as embodied in a monarchy; (e) internal freedom 
as embodied in the free state; (/) after the free 
state — what? 

2. The law of development as applied to religion. 

(1) The patriarchal period. 

(2) State religions. 

(3) Ethnic religions based upon external forms, 
(a) Babylon; (&) Egypt; (c) Judea; (d) Greece. 

(4) Cosmopolitanism in religion based upon freedom 
of conscience for the individual. 

3. Christ, the center of world history, marking the ado- 

lescence of the race. 

II. Hebrew History as Illustrating Religious Develop- 
ment. 

1. The patriarchal period. 

(1) Priests of the family — Abram, Isaac, Jacob, Mel- 
chizedek. 

2. The transition to external law. 

(1) Moses and Sinai. 

(2) The Judges. 

(3) Evolution into monarchy. 

3. The period of external law. 
(1) The kingdom. 



APPENDIX 163 

(2) Temple worship of David and Solomon. 

(3) Idolatry of later kings. 

4. Transition to internal law. 

(1) The prophets — Elijah, Elisha, Malachi. 

(2) The Messianic predictions — Psalms 23, 2, etc.; 
Isaiah 53, and elsewhere. 

5. The Messianic period. 

(1) The Sermon on the Mount — "Not to destroy, but 
to fulfil." 

(2) The Epistle to the Hebrews. 

(3) John 1: 17— key-text. 

6. Types and antitypes in Jewish history. 

7. The significance of the Old Testament. 

III. Adolescence of the World Consciousness in Christ. 

1. The world consciousness — figurative use of the term. 

2. Point of departure — the discovery of the individual. 

(1) The individual in Greek and Roman thought. 

(2) The individual in Christ's teaching. 

3. Soul values internal rather than external. 

4. The testimony of church history. 

(1) Roman Catholicism, (a) Growth of external cere- 
monies borrowed from Jewish and heathen rites; 
(&) ceremonialism as related to atheism — Leo X., 
Taine's comment; (c) ceremonialism as related to 
immorality — Alexander VI. and Cassar Borgia. 

(2) The Protestant Reformation, (a) Luther in Rome; 
(&) Tetzel and indulgences. 

(3) The counter Reformation, (a) Savonarola; (&) 
Loyola. 

5. Modern progress due to the unfolding of essential prin- 

ciples of Christianity. 

IV. Christianity a Religion of Ideals and Not a Code 

of Laws. 

1. Childhood and positive statute. 

2. Religions of statute. 
(1) Judaism. 



164 APPENDIX 

(2) Mohammedanism. 

3. Religions of ideals. 

(1) Buddhism. 

(2) Confucianism. • 

(3) Stoicism. 

4. Jesus as a formulator of ideals. 

(1) Compare with Buddha; Confucius; Socrates. 
5 Example versus precept. 

6. Christianity a system of ethical ideals, embodied in a 

great personality. 

7. Hero-worship: Its value. 

Reference Books for Part I. 

"Ethical Principles," Seth; "History of Ancient Re- 
ligions," Rawlinson; "The Evolution of Religion," Caird; 
"Fetichism," Schultze; "Orpheus," Reinach; "Can We 
Still Be Christians?" Eucken; "Creative Evolution," Berg- 
son; "The Realm of Ends," Ward; "Outlines of Christian 
Theology," Clarke; "The Ascent of Man," Drummond; "Old 
Pictures in Florence: The Bishop Orders His Tomb at 
St. Praxed's," Robert Browning; "The Gospel and the 
Church," Loisy; "Religions of Authority and the Religion 
of the Spirit," Sabatier; "History of English Literature" 
(chapter on the Pagan Renaissance), Taine. 

PART II. 
Outlines Covering Chapter I. 

I. The Nature of Christian Ideals. 

1. Sources of information. 

(1) Bible. 

(2) Sacred literature. 

(3) Christian biography. 

2. The ideals of Jesus. 

(1) Righteousness — the personal goal. 

(2) Service — the social goal. 

(3) Freedom — the comprehensive goal. 



APPENDIX 165 

3. Righteousness. 

(1) Humility. 

(2) Duty. 

(3) Kindness. 

(4) Industry. 

(5) Truthfulness. 

(6) Chastity. 

(7) Good citizenship. 

(8) Honesty. 

(9) Temperance. 

4. Only an approximate analysis. 

5. Two errors. 

(1) Substitution of religious forms for ideals. 

(2) Substitution of mistaken ideals for true ones. 

6. The negative value of the ideals. (Romanes.) 

7. The unique embodiment of these ideals in Jesus himself. 
8 The new elements — passive virtues. 

References. 

Matthew 5-7; "Ecce Homo" (Chap. XIII.) , Seeley; 
"Ethics of Jesus" (Chaps. V.-VIL), King; "The Church's 
One Foundation" (Chap. V.), Nicol. 

II. Humility. 

1. The basic virtue. 

2. Contrast with Greek and Roman culture. 

3. Views of modern biologists. 

4. The teaching of Nietzsche. 

5. The confirmation of science. 

6. Contradictions in religious history. 

7. Practical application. 

Texts. 

Matt. 5: 3, 5; 18: 1-6; 20: 20-28; 21: 4, 5; Mark 9: 33- 
37; 10: 13-16, 35-45; Luke 9: 46-48; 10: 21; 18: 9-17. 

References. 

"Nietzsche," Mencken; "The Evolution of Man," 
Haeckel; "Discourses," Epictetus; "Meditations," Marcus 



166 APPENDIX 

Aurelius; Articles on Sir Isaac Newton in the encyclo- 
pedias. 

III. Duty: The Keynote of Life. 

1. Duty denned. 

2 The categorical imperative. 

3 The idea of a "calling." 
4. A purposeful universe. 

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson. 
5 The reality of the ideal. 
G. The meaning of success. 
7 Duty and love as motives. 

8. The life of Jesus the perfect realization of an absolute 

standard. 

9. Duty in history. 

(1) Luther. 

(2) Knox. 

(3) John the Baptist. 

References. 

The life of Christ: Childhood (Luke 2: 49) ; early min- 
istry (Matt. 3: 15); first miracle (John 2: 4); Sermon on 
the Mount (Matt. 5:6; 6:24, 33); raising of Lazarus 
(John 11: 8-16) ; steadfastness in his course (Mark 10: 32, 
34; Luke 9: 51) ; on the cross (John 19: 30). 

Paul: Acts 20: 24; 1 Tim. 6: 12; 2 Tim. 2: 15; 4: 17; 
salutation to Epistles, "called to be an apostle," etc. 

Literature. 

"The Discourses of Epictetus;" "Marcus Aurelius;" 
"Critique of Practical Reason," Kant; "Ethics of the Scot- 
tish School;" "Life of Cato the Younger," Plutarch; "Ode 
to Duty," Wordsworth; "Julius Caesar" (character of 
Brutus), Shakespeare; "Duty Surviving Self-love," Cole- 
ridge; "Epistle to a Young Friend," Burns; "The Realm 
of Ends," James Ward. 



APPENDIX 167 



IV. Kindness. 

1 The cruelty of nature. 

Huxley, Darwin, Schopenhauer. 

2. The cruelty of man. 

Law. Religion. Inquisition. 

3. The cruelty of religion. 

(1) Future punishment. 

(2) Mythology and Christianity. 

(3) The real Inferno. 

4. The ideal and experience of Christ. 

5. Cruelty in the name of Christ. 

6. Reforms of the present day. 

(1) Prisons. 

(2) Capital punishment. 

7. Sins condemned. 

(1) Personal, (a) 111 temper; (ft) cruelty; (c) revenge. 

(2) Social, (a) Envy; (&) hatred; (c) slander. 

(3) National, (a) Slavery; (&) murder; (c) war. 

Texts. 

Matt. 5: 7, 9, 22; 6: 12; 7: 1, 12; 11: 28; 12: 18-20; 
18: 10-35; 20: 34; Mark 1: 4; 9: 38, 39; 11: 25; Luke 4: 18, 
19; 7: 47; 15: 1-32; 17: 4; 23: 34-43; John 3: 16; 13: 34; 
Eph. 4: 32; 1 Corinthians 13; 1 John 3 and 4. 

References. 

"Law of Love and Love as Law," Hopkins; "Ad- 
dresses," Drummond; "Sermons," Edwards; "Divine 
Comedy," Dante; "Man Was Made to Mourn," Burns; 
"Sermons," Beecher. 

V. Kindness (continued). 

(The Doctrine of Non-resistance.) 

Three theories: 

1. Theoretically and practically valid — St. Francis, Fox, 

Tolstoi. 

2. Theoretically valid and practically invalid — majority 

of Christians. 



168 APPENDIX 

3. Theoretically and practically invalid — Professor Foster. 
4 Solution — Sermon on the Mount a collection of ideals, 
and not a code of laws. 

Texts. 

Matt. 5: 38-48; 26: 50-52; 27: 40-44; Mark 15: 32; Luke 
18: 34. 

References. 

"Life of St. Francis," Sabatier; "The Little Flowers 
of St. Francis;" "My Confession," Tolstoi; "My Religion," 
Tolstoi; "The Gospel in Brief," Tolstoi; "Journal of George 
Fox;" "Milman's History of Latin" ("Christianity" — Book 
IX.); "The Finality of the Christian Religion," Foster. 

VI. Industry. 

1. Industry the first law of God. 

2. Teaching of modern philosophy — Schopenhauer, Berg- 

son. 

3. The old definition of a gentleman. 

4. Christ's sympathy with the workers. 

5. Labor organizations and the church. 

6. The apostolic point of view. 

7. Laziness in pulpit and pew. 

8. The Middle Age monk. 

Texts. 

Matt. 7: 7, 21, 24-27; 25: 14-30; Mark 4: 25; Luke 
6: 46; 8: 18; 19: 11-27; John 5: 17; 7: 17; 9: 4; 1 Thess. 
4: 11; 2 Thess. 3: 7-12; Eph. 4: 28; 1 Cor. 4: 12. 

References. 

"The Quest of Happiness," Hillis; "Jesus Christ and 
the Christian Character," Peabody; "The Sons of Martha," 
Kipling; "Faust," Goethe; "Rabbi Ben Ezra," R. Browning. 

VII. Truthfulness. 

1. The question of abstract truth. 

(1) Psychological — correspondence of an idea with its 
object (Kant). 



APPENDIX 169 

(2) Metaphysical — the ultimate goal of reason. 

(3) Mystical — the unknown source of genius. 

2 The practical problem. 

(1) Exaggeration. 

(2) Equivocation. 

(3) Hypocrisy. 

3 Is a lie ever justifiable? 

4. Scientific devotion to truth. 

5. The business and social value of truthfulness. 

6. The Jesuit policy. 

7. Truthfulness and discretion. 

Texts. 

Matt. 19: 18; 23: 13-29; 1 John 1: 6-10; 3 John 1, 3, 4, 
8; John 1: 17; 8: 44-46; 17: 19; 18: 37, 38; Rev. 21: 8, 27; 
22: 15. 

References. 

"Truth," Bacon's Essays; "The Marks of a Man," 
Speer; "Is a Lie Ever Justifiable?" Trumbull; "Imago 
Christi" (Chap. XV.) — "Christ as a Controversialist;" 
"Life and Letters of Huxley" (Vol. III.). 

VIII. Personal Puritt. The Home Ideal — Preservation 
and Loss. 

1. Purity of heart central in Christ's moral code. 

2. The vital factor in personal purity, a high home ideal. 

3. Falsity of the celibate ideal — Creed of Council of Trent. 

4. The Christian home — fundamental essentials. 

(1) Absolute confidence. 

(2) Mutual sympathy. 

(3) Mutual forbearance. 

(4) Mutual respect. 

(5) Justice. 

5. Christ's attitude toward marriage. 

(1) At Cana. 

(2) The Sermon on the Mount. 

(3) The question of the Pharisees — Mark 10. 



170 APPENDIX 

(4) The question of the Sadducees — Matthew 22. 

6. The attitude of the apostles. 

(1) Peter— Mark 1: 30; 1 Cor. 9: 5. 

(2) John— Rev. 22: 17. 

(3) Paul— 1 Cor. 9: 5, 7. 

(4) Heb. 13: 4. 

7. The modern eugenic movement. 

8 Clean thought, speech and action. 

Texts. 

Matt. 5: 8, 27-32; Mark 10: 2-12, 14; 1 Cor. 6: 9-20; 
Gal. 5: 19; Eph. 5: 3-5; John 2: 1-11. 

References. 

"The Marks of a Man" (Chap. II.), Speer; Modern 
Texts on Eugenics; The Sylvanus Stall Series. 

IX. Marriage. 

1. The origin of marriage. 
2 Primitive marital customs. 

3. Marriage ideals of Greeks. 

4. Marriage ideals of Romans. 

5. Marriage ideals of Jews. 

6 The Christian ideal. 

(1) Christ. 

(2) Paul. 

7 Non-Christian ideals of the present. 

(1) The French ideal. 

(2) Materialistic Socialism. 

8. The sins of development. 

(1) Monogamy for polygamy. 

(2) The indissoluble ideal. 

(3) The spiritualization of the relation. 

(4) The higher dignity given to womanhood. 

(5) Added emphasis upon the home. 

9. Celibacy and Christianity. 



APPENDIX 171 

Texts. 

John 2: 1-11; Mark 10: 6-9. Paul: 1 Cor. 9:9; 7; Heb. 
10: 4; Rev. 20: 12. 

References. 

"Gesta Christi" (Chap. III.); "History of European 
Morals," Lecky; "History of Human Marriage" (1891), 
Westermarck; "History of Matrimonial Institutions" 
(1904), Howard; "Golden Bough" (1890, 1900), Frazer. 

X. Divorce. 

1. Origin of divorce. 

2. The Eastern nations. 

3 The Greeks. Athens — divorce to either party upon ap- 

plication. Harder for women. 

4 The Romans — free to both parties. "Women counted 

years by husbands. 

5 Jews — man's privilege alone. 
6. The teaching of Christ. 

(1) Divorce. 

(2) Remarriage. 

7 The teaching of Paul. 
Corinthian church. 

8. The mediaeval point of view. 
Charlemagne and the Papal bull. 
Henry VIII. 

9. Modern divorce. 

(1) France. 

(2) England. 

(3) America. 
Separate State laws. 

10. The church attitude to-day. 

11. Progress. 

(1) Lessening of divorces. 

(2) Man and woman on equal terms. 

(3) Higher ideals of marriage. 

(4) Christianity guards marriage rather than divorce. 



172 APPENDIX 

Texts. 

Matt. 5: 31, 32; 19: 3-11; Mark 10: 2-12; Luke 16: 18; 
Rom. 7: 1-4; 1 Cor. 7: 10, 11. 

Reference. 

"The History of Divorce and Remarriage," Wilkins. 

XI. The Home Ideal (concluded). 

1 Marital unfaithfulness. 

(1) Ancient viewpoint — Greeks, Romans, Hebrews. 

(2) The Biblical teaching. 

(3) The modern world — France, Austria. 

2. Destructive literature. 

(1) The problem novel. 

(2) Magazine slush. 

(3) The might have been in literature. 

3. The influence of art, the drama, dress, customs, etc. 

(1) Art — the nude in art. 

(2) Drama — cheap plays. 

(3) Dress — Tolstoi's criticism. 

(4) Customs — dancing. 

4. The home life — parent and child. 

(1) Duties of the parent, (a) Preservation; (&) educa- 
tion; (c) inspiration. 

(2) Duties of the child, (a) Docility; (&) respect; 
(c) loyalty. 

5. Duty and love in the home. 

Texts. 

Matt. 5: 27, 28; 15: 19; 29: 18; John 8: 1-11; Rev. 20: 
8; 22: 15. Divorce: Matt. 5: 31; 19: 3-12; 10: 2-12; Luke 
16: 18; Deut. 24: 1; Gen. 1: 27; 2 :24; Eph. 5: 31; 1 Cor. 
7: 10, 11. 

References. 

"The History of Divorce and Remarriage," Wilkins; 
"Love and Marriage; Love and Ethics," Ellen Key; "The 
Lady and the Painter;" concluding paragraphs of "The 



APPENDIX 17S 

Ring and the Book," Robert Browning; "What Is Art?" 
(Chaps. IX. and XVII.) , Tolstoi. 

XII. Good Citizenship* 

1= The ideal of citizenship. 

2. Christ's attitude toward law and order. 

3. Attitude of the early church. 

4. Christ's attitude toward governmental problems. 

(1) Anarchism. 

(2) Socialism. 

5. The attitude of the Christian toward 

(1) Mob law. 

(2) Municipal corruption. 

(3) Debauchery of the ballot. 
6 Christianity and politics. 

(1) Voting. 

(2) Bearing arms. 

(3) Office-holding. 

Texts. 

Matt. 17: 24-27; 22: 15-22; Rom. 13: 1-7; 1 Pet. 2: 13-17. 

References. 

Plato (especially "The Republic"); "The City of God," 
St. Augustine; the writings of Fox and Tolstoi; lectures 
and sermons of Beecher. 

XIII. Honesty. 

1. The idea of property. 

Legal definition — personality. 
2 Property rights among the Jews — Ten Commandments. 
3. Christ's attitude toward property. 

(1) Rich young ruler. 

(2) Sermon on the Mount. 

(3) The rich fool. 

(4) Rich man and Lazarus. 
4 Attitude of early church. 

(1) Barnabas. 

(2) Ananias and Sapphira. 



174 APPENDIX 

5. Christianity and business. 

(1) Business ethics and the preacher. 

(2) The problem of debt. 

(3) Ministerial mendicancy. 

6. The modern worship of money. 
Reaction to-day. 

Long, Carnegie, Rockefeller. 

7. Two guiding principles to guarantee honesty. 

(1) Love thy neighbor as thyself. 

(2) What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul? 

Texts. 

Matt. 6: 25-34; 10: 9, 10; 13: 22; 15: 19; 19: 18, 23; 
21: 13; Luke 16: 1-5, 19-31; Mark 7: 22, 23; Acts 2: 43- 
47; Luke 12: 13-21; Acts 4: 32-37; Rom. 12: 17; 13: 8-10. 

XIV. Temperance. 

1. Meaning of word. 

2. Virtue among Greeks. 

3. Narrowed definition to-day. 

4. Temperance and abstinence. 

5. The liquor question. 

6. Drug habits. 

7. The law of liberty. 

8. The law of liberty and the law of service. 

Texts. 

Matt. 10: 8; 29: 48-50; Mark 7: 1-23; Luke 15: 13, 14; 
16: 19; Rom. 12: 1, 2, 14; 1 Corinthians 8 and 9; Gal. 5: 
16-24; Phil. 4: 8. 

References. 

"The Marks of a Man," Speer; "Those Who Have Come 
Back," Macfarlane; "Twice-born Men," Begbie; "Drink," 
Zola; "Lectures," Gough. 

NOTES ON CHAPTER II. 
The problem of the social ideal of Jesus looms so large 
on the horizon of present-day Christianity that it would 



APPENDIX 175 

require a volume to even approximate an adequate treat- 
ment. Instead of essaying this task, we prefer to suggest 
some of the best literature of the day, leaving the student 
to work out his own material from the volumes recom- 
mended. 

Perhaps the sanest treatment from the modern point 
of view is that of Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch, of 
Rochester University, whose two volumes, "Christianity 
and the Social Crisis" and "Christianizing the Social 
Order," leave little to be desired, at least as we view the 
question. 

The radical standpoint is presented in such volumes 
as Bouck White's "The Call of the Carpenter" and "Let- 
ters of the Social Revolution." 

The more conservative side is presented in W. M. 
Clow's "Christ in the Social Order," and in the Roman 
Catholic writings, such as those of Professor Ryan and of 
Father Vaughan. 

Good books to read on the subject in general are the 
following: "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," Pea- 
body; "Religion in Social Action," Graham Taylor; "The 
Social Creed of the Churches," Ward; "Spiritual Culture 
and Social Service," Macfarland; "Social Psychology," 
MacDougall; "The Ethics of Jesus and Social Progress," 
Gardner; also the works of Jane Addams, Shailer Math- 
ews and of Professors Batten and Vedder. 

NOTES ON CHAPTER III. 
I. The Principle of Freedom. 

1. Definition of freedom. 

2. National freedom. 

3. Personal freedom. 

4. Christianity and slavery. 

5. The caste spirit. 

6. Catholicism and freedom. 

7 Protestantism and freedom. 

8. Martyrs to freedom. 

9. Freedom and the early church. 



176 APPENDIX 

10. Kinds of freedom. 

(1) Moral. 

(2) Intellectual. 

(3) Physical. 

(4) Metaphysical. 

(5) Economic. 

Texts. 

Mark 7; John 8: 32-36; the Epistle to Philemon; the 
Epistle to the Galatians; Luke 4: 16-30. 

References. 

John Stuart Mill on Liberty; "Essay on Liberty," 
Hobbes; "Essays," Mazzini; "Ethics," Aristotle; "The 
Growth of Freedom," Nevinson; "Philosophy of History," 
Hegel; "Gesta Christi," Brace. 

II. Moral Freedom. 

1 Definition of the term. 

2 No metaphysical principle directly asserted. 

3. Christianity, being a moral religion, must have a moral 

basis. 

4. Christ always assumed the principle of human respon- 

sibility. 
6. The early Christians preached the doctrine of universal 
accountability. 

(1) Apparent contradiction in Paul. 

(2) The "whosoevers" of the Gospel. 

Texts. 

Matt. 11: 28; 28: 19; John 3: 16; Rom. 10: 11; Rev. 
22: 17. 

References. 

"An Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will," Jonathan 
Edwards; "The Will to Believe," William James; "The 
Realm of Ends," Ward; "The Conception of God," and 
"The World and the Individual," Royce. 



APPENDIX 177 



III. Freedom of Thought. 

General Text. — "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth 
shall make you free." — John 8: 32. 
1 The last phase. 

2. The part played by dogmatic Christianity. 

3. "Freethinking," so called, and Christianity. 

4. Modernism and higher criticism. 

5. The scientific spirit and modern Christianity. 

6 "Belief," as Christ used the term, not an intellectual 

clamp, but simply a moral acquiescence. 
7. The passing of creeds. 

Texts. 

All texts dealing with the binding power of the law 
in the old dispensation and freedom from it in the new; 
Mark 7: 3, etc.; Rom. 7: 4; Gal. 2: 4; John 1: 17; 7: 34. 

IV. Limitations of Freedom. 

1 Thought and action: their relation. 

2 Free thought and thoughtless action. 

3 Relation of the right philosophy to the right life. 
4. The failure of philosophic creeds. 

(1) An ultimate philosophy unintelligible at present. 

(2) A present-day philosophy will be outgrown in the 
future. 

5 The attitude of science toward Christianity. 

(1) The evolutionary school, (a) Huxley; (&) Spencer; 
(c) Clifford ;(d) Tyndall. 

(2) Latter-day students, (a) Kelvin; (&) Ramsay; (c) 
Romanes. 

6 Esthetic and volitional elements a part of life as well 

as the intellectual. 

7. Agnosticism and intellectual freedom. 

8. Freedom of thought and the Infinite. 

References. 

"Defense of Philosophic Doubt" and "The Founda- 
tions of Belief," Balfour; "The Dawn of a New Religious 
Era," Carus. 



178 APPENDIX 

NOTES ON CHAPTERS IV., V. AND VI. 

I. Nature and Importance of the Problem. 

1. The non-miraculous type of Christianity. 

2 Can such a type be reconciled to the New Testament? 

3. Relative value of the now and the hereafter. 

4. Bearing of the former upon the latter. 

5. Religion versus ethics in life. 

6. Christ differentiated from other great teachers here. 

(1) Socrates. 

(2) Zeno. 

(3) Confucius. 

(4) Zoroaster. 

Texts. 

1 Corinthians 14; John 3: 15, 16; 4:1; Matt. 13: 36- 
43; 10: 28; 1 Pet. 1: 4, 5; John 6. 

References. 

"The Christian Hope," Brown; "The Miraculous Ele- 
ment in the Gospels," Bruce; "Psychical Research and the 
Resurrection," Hyslop. 

II. The Mystical Basis of Christianity. 

1. Definition of terms. 

(1) Mystical, (a) Immediate; (b) Personal; (c) 
Ecstatic and emotional. 

(2) Supernatural, (a) Miraculous; (ft) Mechanical; 
(c) Formal. 

(3) Spiritual, (a) Scientific; (ft) Immanent; (c) 
Philosophic. 

2. Distinction from the ethical basis. 
Contrast Voltaire. 

3. Necessity of the mystical or supernatural for religion. 

(1) Eucken. 

(2) James. 

(3) The idea of God. 

4 Relation to literature and art. 
Burroughs, Plato, Hegel. 



APPENDIX 179 

5 The subject in historical religion. 
The old mysteries. 
Christianity and positivism. 

References. 

"Christian Mysticism," Dr. W. R. Inge (Bampton Lec- 
tures) ; "The Mystical Element of Religion," Baron von 
Hugel; "Mysticism," Evelyn Underhill; "Mysticism in 
Christianity," W. K. Fleming; Works of Plotinus, St. 
Barnard, St. Francis, Madame Guyon, J. Boehme, John 
Bunyan and George Fox; "The Rod, the Root and the 
Flower," Coventry Patmore. 

III. Jesus and the Supernatural. 

1. Place which it occupies in his life. 

(1) Birth. 

(2) Miracles. 

(3) Prayer. 

(4) Resurrection. 

2. Place in his teachings. 

(1) Fatherhood of God. 

(2) Kingdom of heaven. 

(3) The non-materiality of his sermons. 

3 His philosophy of life. 

(1) The practical element. 

(2) The conscious basis. 

(3) Unity with God. 

4 The Holy Spirit. 

5 Special instances. 

(1) The temptation. 

(2) The transfiguration. 

Texts. 

Matt. 4: 19, 20; 6: 25-32; 11: 25-27; 12: 39-42; 22: 23- 
33; Luke 16:19-31; 9:28-36; John 5:17-29; 4:23-26; 8: 
23-29; 14: 9-13; 15: 9, 10; 17: 3. 



180 APPENDIX 



IV. The Reality of the Spiritual Life. 

1. The philosophy of the New Testament. 

2 Idealism defined. 
Matter versus spirit. 

3 Jesus a pronounced idealist. 

4 The world and the kingdom. 

5 The function of will in philosophy and religion. 

6 Immanence and transcendence in Christianity. 
7. Evolution and Christianity. 

The ape and the tiger. 
Animal and spiritual. 

Texts. 

2 Cor. 4: 17, 18; 5: 1-6; Matt. 6: 19, 20; John 8: 58; 
4: 24; Phil. 3: 20, 21; Heb. 13: 14; Rev. 22: 1-5; Rom. 
14: 6-11. 

References. 

"Christianity and the New Idealism;" "The Truth of 
Religion;" "Religion and Life," Eucken; "Rabbi ben Ezra," 
Browning; "The Will to Believe," James. 

V. The Resurrection. 

1. The resurrection the crux of Christianity. 
Paul's testimony. 

2. The fact of miracle staked upon it. 

3. Testimony to the resurrection. 
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul. 
The appearances: 

Sunday — 

(1) Mary Magdalene. 

(2) Other women. 

(3) Peter. 

(4) Emmaus. 

(5) Disciples, Thomas absent. 

(6) Disciples, with Thomas. 

(7) Seven disciples — Tiberias. 

(8) Mountain in Galilee. 

(9) James. 



APPENDIX 181 

(10) The ascension. 

(Possibly) (11) Great Commission. 

4. Character of appearances. 

(1) Appears and disappears suddenly (Luke 24: 31,51) ; 
in their midst (Luke 24: 36; John 20: 14; 21: 4); 
closed doors (John 20: 19, 26). 

(2) No immediate recognition (Luke 24: 16-31; John 
20:14; 21:4-7); identity doubted (Matt. 28:17); 
thought a spirit (Luke 24: 37) ; timid — no one dared 
address (John 21: 12); fell down and gave divine 
honors (John 20: 17-28; Matt. 28: 9-17). 

Contra. Jesus eats (Luke 24: 39-43); Jesus walks 
(Luke 24: 30); sits at table (John 21: 13); shows 
hands and side (John 20:27); some desire to 
touch (John 20:17; Matt. 28:9); others urge to 
stay (Luke 24: 29). 

5. The resurrected body. 

(1) Lazarus and Jesus — difference. 

(2) Where during forty days? 

(3) Disciples' faith in future life. 

(4) Resurrected body necessarily materialized for evi- 
dence. 

(5) Paul's testimony — 1 Corinthians 15. 

6. Modern science and the resurrection. 

7. The three positions. 

(1) Physical resurrection. 

(2) Spiritual resurrection — Keim, Lake — spiritual 
visions materialized. 

(3) Semi-spiritual — Orr. 

Texts. 

1 Corinthians 15; Acts 17: 16-34; 2 Tim. 4: 6-8; Heb. 
13: 20, 21; Rom. 6: 4-6; Gospel accounts. 

References. 

"The Resurrection of Jesus Christ," Orr; Lives of 
Christ by Gilbert, Rhees, Andrews, Strauss, Keim, Renan, 
Weiss. 



182 APPENDIX 

VI. Christianity axd the Future. 

1. The unending problem. Plato, Kant. 

2 The situation to-day. 

(1) The viewpoint of pure science. Munsterberg, 
Edison. 

(2) Viewpoint of philosophy. Eucken, Ward, Bergson, 
Balfour. 

(3) Pseudo-science. Psychical research — Hodgson; 
Myers; Spiritualism; Theosophy. 

3. Practical bearings of the question. The teaching of 

Karma. 

4. Christianity the guardian of personal immortality. 

5. Conditional immortality. 

(1) "Immortality of soul" not in Bible. 

(2) Athenagoras. 

(3) Jewish doctrine. Resurrection of wicked (Matt. 
25: 31; Rom. 2: 5-10; John 5: 28, 29; Acts 24: 15; 
Rev. 20: 12, 15). 

(4) Immortality— 1 Cor. 15: 53, 54; Rom. 2: 7; 2 Tim. 
1: 10. 

References. 

"Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death," 
F. W. H. Myers; "The Winning of Immortality," Fred- 
erick Palmer; "The Christian Doctrine of Immortality," 
S D. F. Salmond; "The Evolution of Immortality," Mc- 
Connell; "The Assurance of Immortality," Harry Emer- 
son Fosdick; "Our Immortality," Maeterlinck. 

PART III. 
Formal Christianity. 

I. The Church. 

1. What is the church? 

2. The New Testament idea. 

3 The historical development idea. 
4. The church in the Gospels. 



APPENDIX 183 

5 The church in the Acts. 

6 Paul's idea of the church. 

7 The necessity for the church. 

8 Analysis of church (Acts 2: 42). 

(1) Doctrine — creed. 

(2) Fellowship — polity — social features. 

(3) Breaking of bread — ordinance. 

(4) Prayers — mystical element. 

Texts. 

Matt. 16: 17-20; Acts 2: 42-47; 8:3; 14: 23; 1 Cor. 16: 
19; 2 Cor. 1: 1; Gal. 1: 2; Phil. 3: 6; Col. 1: 18; 1 Tim. 
3: 15; Rev. 1: 4; 1 Cor. 12: 27; Eph. 1: 23. 

References. 

"Organization of the Early Christian Churches," 
Hatch; "Christian Ecclesia," Hort; "Teaching of the 
Twelve Apostles" (1884), Harnack; "The Early Church," 
Horton. 

II. The Evolution of Creed. 

1 The confession of Peter. 

2. The apostles' creed. 

3. Early sects in church. 

(1) Greek party. 

(2) Jewish party. 

(3) Heresy in Paul's day. 

(4) Heresy in John's day. 

(5) Gnosticism. 

(6) Ebionites. 

4. Creeds arise to suppress heresy. 

5. Nicene Creed. Trinity. 

6 Athanasian Creed. Holding church's belief a necessity 
of salvation. 

7. The failure of man-made creeds. 

8. Apostles' creed. 

(1) God. 

(2) Jesus Christ. 

(3) Virgin birth. 



184 APPENDIX 

(4) Sufferings and death. 

(5) Descent into Hades. 

(6) Resurrection. 

(7) Ascension. 

(8) Intercession. 

(9) Judgment. 

(10) Holy Ghost. 

(11) Holy Catholic Church. 

(12) Communion of saints. 

(13) Forgiveness of sins. 

(14) Resurrection of body. 

(15) Life everlasting. 

9. Nicene Creed. 

(1) Of all things visible and invisible. 

(2) Born of Father before all ages. Consubstantial to 
the Father, etc. 

(3) Incarnate by the Holy Ghost. 

(4) (Descent omitted.) 

(5) Holy Ghost proceedeth from the Father and the 
Son. 

(6) One holy catholic and apostolic church. 

(7) (Omitted.) 

(8) One baptism for the remission of sins. 

(9) I look for the resurrection of the dead. 

(10) Life of the world to come. 

10. Tridentine. 

(1) Sacraments. 

(2) Mass. 

(3) Transubstantiation. 

(4) One kind legitimate. 

(5) Scriptures interpreted according to church tradi- 
tions. 

(6) Roman Church. 

(7) St. Peter. 

(8) Council proceedings. 

(9) Justification. 

(10) Original sin. 



APPENDIX 185 

11. Post-tridentine. 

(1) Immaculate conception. 

(2) Infallible pope. 

(3) This true Catholic faith out of which no one can 
be saved I vow and swear, etc. 

References. 

"History of Christian Church," Schaff; "Ministerial 
Priesthood," Moberly. 

III. Creeds of the Churches To-day. 

1. Attitude of Roman Catholicism. 

(1) Modernism. 

(2) Pius X. 

2. Current Protestantism. 

(1) Episcopalianism. Liberal interpretation. 

(2) Congregationalism. 

(3) Presbyterianism. 

(4) Methodism. North and South. 

(5) Baptist Churches. Southern. 

(6) The Federal Council. 

Reference. 
"Churches of the Federal Council," Macfarland. 

IV. Ordinance. 

1 Definition. 

2 Distinction from creed. 

3 Ordinance and sacrament. 

A. The two ordinances of Christ. 

5. The necessity for the ordinances. 

6. The twofold side of the ordinances. 
7 Mistaken views of the ordinances. 

(1) Protestant extreme. Quakerism. 

(2) Catholic extreme. Sacramentarianism. 

Texts. 

Matt. 28: 19; Mark 16; 16; Luke 22: 17-20; Acts 2: 38- 
41; 8: 36-39; John 3: 5; Rom. 6: 3, 4; Col. 2: 12; Gal. 
3: 27; 1 Pet. 3: 21; Tit. 3: 5. 



186 APPENDIX 



V. The First Ordinance. 

1. Baptism defined. 
2 Question involved. 

(1) Design. 

(2) Subjects. 

(3) Action. 

3. Baptism in history. 

4. Mistaken views of baptism. 
5 Characteristics. 

(1) Greek equivalents. 

(2) The question of translation. 

(3) The "Century" definition. 

Texts. 

Matt. 28: 19; Mark 16: 16; Acts 2: 38; 8: 36-39; Rom. 
6: 3, 4; Col. 2: 12; 1 Pet. 3: 21; Tit. 3: 5. 

References. 

"Moral and Spiritual Aspects of Baptism," Aylsworth; 
"Christian Baptism," Campbell; "The Form of Baptism," 
Briney; "The Campbell-Rice Debate;" "Christian Bap- 
tism," Kershner. 

VI. Baptism: Its Moral and Spiritual Aspect. 

1. The two extremes. Fedobaptist and legalist. 

2. The pedobaptist idea of significance derived from pre- 

Christian sources. 

3. Legalist idea a similar survival. 

4. Moral and spiritual elements involved. 

(1) Faith. 

(2) Obedience. 

(3) Symbolism. 

(4) Complete self-surrender. 

5. Is there a mystical element? 

6. The new birth in John. Baptismal regeneration. 

7. Necessity for proper understanding of baptism. 

8. Old Testament deductions. Hyssop-sprinkling, circum- 

cision, etc. 



APPENDIX 187 

Texts. 
Rom. 6: 3, 4; Col. 2:11-13; Tit. 3: 5; 1 Pet. 3: 21. 

Reference. 
"Moral and Spiritual Aspects of Baptism," Aylsworth. 
VII. Baptism. Proper Surjects. 

1. Question depends upon presuppositions. 

2. Scriptural authority lacking. 

3. The argument from expediency. 

4. History of infant baptism. 

5. Infant baptism to-day. 

6. Household baptisms. 
7 Infant dedication. 

References. 

"History of Infant Baptism," Wall; "Campbell-Rice 
Debate." 

VIII. The Lord's Supper. 

1. The element of confession. 

2. The memorial element. 

3. As an ordinance. 

4. The mystical element. 

5. The social element. 

6. Different theories of the eucharist. 

(1) The Roman Catholic. Transubstantiation. 

(2) The Lutheran. Consubstantiation. 

(3) The Zwinglian. A memorial only. 

(4) The Restoration position. 

7. Manner of administration. 

8. Frequency of administration. 

References. 

"The Christian System," Campbell; "The Early 
Church," Horton; "Scheme of Redemption," Milligan; 
"History of the Reformation," D'Aubigne; "The Lord's 
Supper," Brandt. 



188 APPENDIX 

IX. The Element of Polity. 

1. The Episcopal. 

2. The Presbyterian. 

3. The Congregational. 

4. The Catholic. 

5. Modifications of these four forms. 

6. Polity and the Restoration movement. 

(1) The convention problem. 

(2) The Louisville plan. 

(3) The second Louisville plan. 

(4) The Mellinger plan. 

(5) The regional idea. 

References. 

"Ministerial Priesthood" (Episcopalian), Moberly; 
"History of the Disciples," Moore; "The Christian Eccle- 
sia," Hort; "Organization of the Early Church," Hatch; 
"Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit," 
Sabatier; "Church Polity," Hayden. 

X. Spiritual Elements. 

1. Worship. 

2. Prayer. 

3. The element of music. 

4. Ritual. 

5. Art in religion. 

6. The non-progressive idea. 

7. The place of the mystical in religion. 

8. The Holy Spirit. 

References. 

"Great Souls at Prayer," Tileston; "The Meaning of 
Prayer," Fosdick; "With Christ," Murray; "Alone with 
God," Garrison; "The Holy Spirit," Garrison; "The Life 
of Christ in Art," Farrar; "Mysticism in Christianity," 
Fleming; "Prayer," Hastings; "The Necessity for Inter- 
cessors," Mott. 



APPENDIX 189 

XI. Conversion. 

1. Meaning of word. 

2. Intellectual elements. 

3. Emotional elements. 

4. Volitional elements. 

5. Faith. 

6. Repentance. 

7. Baptism. 

8. The Holy Spirit. 

9. New Testament conversions. 

References. 

"Sermons," Franklin; "Sermons," McGarvey; "Scheme 
of Redemption," Milligan; "Varieties of Religious Experi- 
ence," James; "Twice-Born Men," Begbie. 

XII. Christian Union. 

1. The cause of schism. 

2. The history of schism. 

3. Efforts toward unity. 

4. The Lambeth Quadrilateral. 

5. The Federal Council. 

6. The World Conference. 

7. Present status. 

8. The Restoration plea. 

References. 

"Message of the Disciples for the Union of the 
Church," Ainslie; "The Early Church," Horton; "That 
They All May be One," Wells; "Christian Union," Garri- 
son; "Historical Documents," Young; "How to Promote 
Christian Union," Kershner. 



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